A note to the reader: This is the unedited original copy of this piece. I am currently rewriting this text as I believe it falls flat in many ways. Enjoy what I have so far, as there are some really colorful sentences that I particularly enjoy. But remember, this is a rough draft.
The black sky was freckled with bright dots and milky crescendos of star clusters. Through the smoke of my cigarette I peered down onto the dimly lit desert town of Fernly. I was still shaken, thoughts racing through my mind of what had just transpired. Was I in love with her? Was all this worth it, I wondered. The ember of my smoke burnt my finger, signaling to me that it was almost out of tobacco. The hood of my 1985 Toyota Tercel made the perfect perch as I stare and wonder.
Next to me was my pack of smokes. They chattered around the box as I marked the inventory of only five left. I snatched one out and lit it with the ember of the nub I had left. I had nowhere to go then. I had a job in Reno with only enough gas to get me there. I couldn’t go home. Not now. Not after what happened. That stupid girl! Why didn’t she tell me?
The back seat was too cramped for me to sleep in. Stuffed now with whatever I could grab before fleeing the town of Silver Springs. A skateboard, a couple trash bags of clothes and a CD case. With all its sparsity, my car was still packed. Even the passenger seat had some kind of junk riddling its gray, cigarette burnt cushion. I tried to make the trunk of the hatchback more comfortable but ended up sleeping in the driver’s seat pushed as far back as it could. Even with that I couldn’t find much comfort. Reminding me of trying to sleep on an airplane. Cramped and uncomfortable. With only the cold desert air prompting some sense of freedom that air flight lacks. In the morning I would find somewhere to live, for now, hopefully.
The sign that greets you as you enter Reno stated the city’s presence as “The Biggest Little City In The World.” This gave me a sense of solace as it meant some slower traffic was in store for me. I was happy to be off the highway. The stop and go of the city was a relief compared to the ninety-plus speed-way I just left. My silver tercel had a maximum speed of seventy miles per hour. If I were driving down a hill, with the wind blowing with me. The grimy streets were paved with hustlers, cute hookers (or just girls, it was hard for me to tell then), old men, magicians and families as I drove through the main strip of South Virginia Street. Once through the casino district the traffic and the density of the sidewalk dwellers began to clear up.
I made my way to the west side of town into Reno-Sparks. The posh streets of the west Reno village were almost all two lane roads and freshly, or at least nearly freshly, paved and smooth compared to the cracked decay of the inner-city. By the time I arrived at Spanky’s it was only eight o’clock. I still had several lonely hours until my shift started. With nowhere else to go, I meandered into the bar and walked to kitchen window to say hi to the executive chef. He was more of a simple kitchen manager, but he like to call himself chef.
“Hey Kevin, what’s happenin’,” I asked. It was a slow night so there wasn’t much bustle. He was flirting with one of the servers, as he always does, and only gave me a nod in acknowledgment. I slumped over to the bar and sat down in front of one of the electronic poker machines built into the bar. Every bar in Nevada had video poker built in. I wasn’t old enough to gamble, only nine-teen, but the manager and bar tender didn’t mind if I sat at the bar. As long as I didn’t try to ask for a drink and didn’t put money into the machine it would be fine.
TVs lined the walls with a huge projector set up for the big games in the main dining room that opened into the bar. There was always some sport event or news or cartoons whirring around. Tiger Woods making a put or something pertaining to the war in Iraq or Afghanistan on the news. The air conditioning was always blasting. A welcomed relief from the intense dry heat of the desert. The smell of crispy wings or pizza was stale that day. I still couldn’t get her out of my mind.
Back in Silver Springs, things were different. I had a life there, albeit simple. I lived, seemingly, only to smoke pot and drink beer. Billy didn’t care that I was underage. He was stoked to have someone help him with the mortgage on his trailer. And probably to have company after his wife left him. “You can’t turn a hoe into a house wife,” I would tell him. His wife was previously a prostitute that worked in Carson City’s Red Light District. One of the few legal brothels in the United States. She more than likely went back to bangin’ johns for cash after their separation.
Billy worked at one of the few factories that equated to the economy of the town. It was a wood treatment plant. I always found it ironic that there was a wood treatment plant in a place where there were no trees. Only sand. Sand and grass that gripped onto life with white knuckles. Much like most of the inhabitants of the depressing small towns of Nevada. There were two highways that intersected in the middle of the town. Two small casinos and two gas stations where the truckers would fuel up. If they stopped, which was rare enough. The train would come trough only every other day, if it was busy enough for even that. A section of commerce that was beyond my comprehension then. Throughout town the smells of the plastic of tires racing to leave, gas and diesel being filled, or the hydraulic brakes from the passing trucks mixed with exhaust from the passing vehicles. Nostrils crusted with sand made it difficult to differentiate fuel from rubber. No one stayed in that dismal place for long. I had nowhere else to go.
Before I lived with Billy, I lived with Richard and his family. A tall, thick man who always had a thick, dark beard. He was a vet of some war. I was never sure of which war, because the story would change every time he told it. Was it the Korean War? I don’t know. All I knew was that it left him disabled. A disability that he used to insure that he could stay at home and dictate to everyone their lives in between swigs of whiskey or vodka. He had two sons, Richard Jr and Justin. William, a friend who we all knew back in Alaska, also lived with us. Will, Jr and I were all about the same age. Between the three of us, we had some fun times. As much fun as one can have in the desert.
They helped me find my Tercel for only $300 through some neighbor, junk-car collector. There were many junk-car collectors in Silver Springs. If you didn’t collect junk trailer homes, you collected junk-cars.
Once I had a working car I became taxi/stunt driver for everyone’s entertainment. Sources of entertainment were scarce with nothing but dunes and casinos. Casinos that you weren’t allowed to go to. We drove off so many dunes with that little Toyota that the chassis became bent. You could see the bent frame sticking out from under the driver and passenger side doors. I later sold that car for $400 right before I left Reno. Looking back, I still can’t figure out how I swindled that one.
We all had girlfriends, too. Some girls stuck around longer than others. Even Justin, at only sixteen years old, had a girlfriend. It was as if there was a prerequisite for living in Richard’s house that we have some kind of Other.
I had broke it off with my girlfriend before I moved to Billy’s house. Jr, Will, Justin and I all remained friends. Justin was in high school still and the three of us worked at a paint factory in Dayton, the next town to the South West. It wasn’t long, however, that I had to quit that job in Dayton. The boys understood. They knew I had a flare for cooking. I had already been cooking for three years by that point. I took a job in Reno as a graveyard prep-cook. It was so much more luxurious than the simple minds I was surrounded by in a paint factory. It was a longer drive – 50 miles compared to 30. I was big time then. Bigger than those simple folk in their simple towns. Yet I was still living in Silver Springs. A cramped town only because of the people and their small talk. The smallest town where only giant events take place. Somehow I met that emo-chick that stole a piece of my heart.
I had met Mandy before, she was Justin’s girlfriend while I was dating my girl from Fernly. She was sixteen, and turned seventeen when I moved to Billy’s place. Mandy always had short hair, like Meg Ryan when she was getting emails from Tom Hanks. Although Mandy was shorter than Meg Ryan, with black streaks in her hair. When she and Justin broke up she started to call me. We fooled around a little, but nothing serious. She was always quirky to me. Always wearing wrist warmers, chains on her pants and always everything black. So quiet and inside of herself. We spent most of our time at her house.
Mandy lived in a shed in the back yard of her parents’ house. With four little sisters living in cramped trailer in the middle of nowhere, it made sense to just get a space-heater and keep your own little place. I was never sure what was wrong with her. Yet, I knew something was not quite right.
She and I would ride horses, her horses, into the desert to stay away from the judging eyes of her parents and the others in the little town. We would make love on a blanket under the forgiving blackness of the night sky. We had no intent on giving away our secret. I was only a year older than her then. Yet, for whatever reason, she wanted our relationship to stay between us.
It wasn’t until the night of the tragedy that things became clearer to me about her. I asked about her wrist warmers. She was reluctant to pull them away to reveal the still fresh, self-inflicted wounds. When I asked why, she answered something so bizarre I thought she was lying to me. “One for every guy I have been with,” she sheepishly said. Mandy explained to me that she thought she was a whore. And the first mark was from her father. I tried to cheer her up. Tried to convince her of another way of dealing with it. We had already had sex by that point and were laying in bed, talking. It was then that Justin walked in on us. It hit me then why she wanted our relationship to be a secret. She hadn’t actually broke it off with between them. I was mortified. I apologized profusely and explained my point of view to Justin. He understood clearly. As clearly as one could through tears of heartbreak. “Just go,” was the last thing I ever heard from either of them. It was Mandy that had trouble with the situation.
I slept in the driver’s seat of my Tercel for three months after that night. I never saw the tumbleweed of Silver Springs again. It wasn’t until my boss, Kevin, offered me a place to stay. Within seven months I had a decent job, was playing in a band, and had nearly any girl in that city with the help of Kevin. We did more blow and drank more liquor than Aerosmith. Nothing tastes the same when you’re geeked out of your mind. Working the graveyard shift didn’t help anything at all. I eventually made friends with a guy who would order a burger every Wednesday. If I made his burger just the way he liked it – three slices of bacon, mushrooms, peppers and onions under the cheese – he would break me off an eight-ball or more. Every week, without fail. That cocaine would blow me up for maybe two days. Perfect for the punk rock band I was playing bass for with Kevin.
Our scheme of giving certain owners a taste of our coke and putting asses in the chairs got me into bars all over Reno. I was the only underage band member at the time. Yet I was essential because, as Kevin would say, “he is the energy, the presence we fuckin’ need.” It was always a drag for the others to drag me around. A kid playing bass. In retrospect, I was just a tweaker with an endless supply of idiot candy and nowhere to go.
It wasn’t often that I would come down off my high. When I did, it was hard to find the vein. Instead I would smoke it. Pills or black tar on tin foil. I would find my release. Chasing that ball around with a straw and a lighter. Just the right amount of temperature or you waste it. And heroin is not cheap enough to waste. When it became time to go, I stopped looking for coke when someone handed me a ball of meth to smoke. It was so much cheaper than coke. Yet I still had my supplier, once a week. At the point that even that didn’t last through my shift. Completely lost, with nowhere to go.
My mother called from Alaska one day. At that point I had two jobs to support my nothing life and she could see that. She hadn’t a clue as to what happened that night, and probably still hasn’t a clue. She offered to fly me home, to Alaska. Finally, a place to go. Somewhere to be. A feeling of importance.
Then I received a call from Mandy’s mother. “What happened,” she asked. The entire town had blamed one instance of one foolish little girl’s reaction on the one guy who was completely and incomprehensibly innate to the inter situation. A fool, in lust and, what I thought was, in love. Lost in love or hurt. I wasn’t sure. I explained to her what she had told me. What she told me about her father. Her father. A piece of filth now god-knows-where.
My drive to Billy’s house was the loneliest I have ever drove.
I went back to Billy’s house. When I arrived I knew there was cheap and liquor somewhere. Trying to drown the pain out with whiskey and beer, I eventually fell asleep on the couch. It wasn’t long after that that Richard and Jr threw the 70’s triangle deco table into my sleeping face. Billy came out, still in his boxers from sleeping, himself, pulling Richard back to stop his fist from connecting with face for the fourth time. When Jr and Billy had Richard off of me long enough, Richard explained that Mandy had gotten a hold of one of her father’s shotguns and put it in her mouth. I grabbed what I could and just drove. I had nowhere to go.
