alex
alex
Despair knows no meaning until the woman you love, into whom you’ve poured your soul and your Christian adoration, thumbs up at your face, links arms with a blonde, blue-eyed archetype with legs, and runs off for meaningless sex in the school basement while you stew in your own juices and curse God for making you such a pansy.
I hate that girl. I don’t even remember her name. That’s how much I hate her.
I’m not depressed often, so I guess I’ve worked up a well-deserved sulk. Of course it’s not love. Football whore. That doesn’t mean my stomach can’t do flips and lurches like it wants out. It’s not the rejection that hurts; it’s not the fact that I wasted thirty cents of gas on her every month, just so I could see that dumb glassy face, Twiggy-pretty, go-go-booted, miniskirt hiked up to perfection. It’s the fact that over this sensitive darling of a boy, she picked that unilayered vacantly-staring muscle-bound thing.
Buried somewhere under the layers of shame and mortification is the good sense I know I have, sometimes, and it’s probably telling me right now that Alex standing there with his Cheshire Cat grin holding a bottle of Gilby’s is not good for me. Alex has never been good for me, but he does own a driver’s license that lets him buy alcohol. He’s also a good listener, when he’s not hammered out of his skull.
I’m not like Alex. I’m a nice boy, and that’s my problem. He’s the kind of kid that drives around on a motorcycle and works for next-to-free at Wendy’s, while straighter-cut dudes like myself putter around in chipped Pontiacs running ’67 engines and have jobs at pharmacies. That said, when I have problems, I go to Alex, and he makes my troubles disappear with the wave of a bottle.
He shrugs on his greasy jacket and takes over the Pontiac. It’s not hard to find nice bubbling brooks in Oak Ridge; he picks a nice wooded spot to pull over and the guzzling begins. In five minutes, everything is wonderfully awful. I feel epic realizations rolling over me and disappearing back into the sea of my mind, and I don’t know whether they are earth-shattering or stupendously lame.
All of life’s tragedies flash by, a huge kaleidoscopic mess. I feel like it’s hurting me deeply, but very soon it hurts not-so-deeply, in a vomiting kind of way. The transition between epiphanic euphoria and misery is instantaneous. All the problems and worries blissfully negated suddenly hurtle back tenfold. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this much like shit in my life.
My door groans open and I feel my center of gravity shifting to accommodate my new position – lurched across the threshold, my torso strewn across the gravel. Alex seems to have been affected by my plight. We are both limply hanging out of our doors, heaving onto the grass.
Preoccupied as I am with being wretched, I do notice that the ground below me has begun to move.
Somehow, in mid-flail as my body slid out of my seat, I have knocked the steering column out of place. Slowly, inevitably, the car rolls. Our leadweight arms leave ruts in the dirt as we are dragged towards the ever-more-deafening roar of the brook. My mind seems to be moving at a glacial pace, and raising my arms proves to be much more difficult than I’d anticipated.
A time period that I can’t quantify passes. The ground is cold and nice, much nicer than the sticky seats of the car. Some yards away, down a steepening incline, the little Pontiac is like a duck dunking for food on the bank of a river, rear end suspended in the air, back wheels rotating futilely. I don’t know why I’m not still in it, but all I can think is that I gathered my thoughts long enough to roll out. Maybe Alex was as lucky, maybe he wasn’t. Little Miss Pin-Up and her go-go boots are mere pinpricks on the horizon of my misfortunes.
Screw it all, say I in my sloshed brilliance. Blacking out seems like a reasonable escalation of my situation. Who knows what’ll happen when I wake up?