Creative Writing: Tuesday

It has been suggested to me that being creative helps with recovery. I have done some creative writing lately and will post my work. I am not sure how this relates to ED, or if it does, but I have enjoyed the writing process.

This is a story I am writing based on actual events. I am about 60% through it. I will post the end eventually.

It is too hot in my room. The East-facing window has no curtains and the floor vent is partially obscured by the dresser so the whole space heats up like a Dutch oven when the sun comes up. Shit. Now I remember. He overdosed. The brief safe time between waking up and remembering why I drank myself to sleep expires abruptly. I draw a deep breath.

In the kitchen I see Lauren dressed for field hockey camp. Braces and shin guards accent her scrawny frame. I sit down and pour myself some Coco Puffs but do not eat them. She tells me about the goal she scored in yesterday's scrimmage. I wonder if Lauren is happy. Is anyone happy at twelve? Is anyone every happy? I hope so.

I can hear muffled music coming from the basement. My Mom is already downstairs, nursing her Irish coffee and updating the journal she keeps in her online bipolar support group. Lauren should have left already but I know Mom has forgotten to take her to camp again. I have a little time; I woke up too early anyway.

"Come on Dude, get your crap together." We get into my Chrysler, Lauren clad in her athletic attire and me in my underwear and an old thrift store tee. She still feels safer sitting in the back seat. Maybe it's only when I drive. We ride silently most of the way and Sublime plays over the two remaining speakers. When we reach the fields we are only a few minutes late. My old coach sees me and shouts down from the field house, something about "classic Johnson fashion". I don't know if she means my lateness or my underwear.

Getting home I find my Mom in the kitchen. I consider telling her the chaos that my day entails, but remembering my brother leaves for college tomorrow I decide against it. I take a shower in the bathroom I used to share with Lauren. The shower head whistles when hot water runs. I shampoo my short hair and put on a black dress that would have been too big six months ago.

I arrive at the dentist's office five minutes late for my appointment. I immediately feel guilty about the cigarette I had on the way over. In the waiting room there is a laminated article comparing teeth in unhealthy gum tissue to a stake in wet ground, easily jostled and pulled out. The secretary calls me into Dr. Holevas' office. He always makes small talk and remembers obscure pieces of last year's conversation. He must keep notes on all the patients. He tells me he could fit me in for a cleaning after he finished my fillings. I motion to my dress and tell him I'm flattered but I have a date with a dead man. All small talk ends abruptly.

With rolls of gauze placed between my gums and cheeks I can see a poster of a waterfall on the opposite wall. Dr. Holevas and the hygienist lean over me with a drill and a suction tube. I feel shards of my teeth hitting the roof of my mouth and I think about Dylan.

He made his living buying Lincoln Town Cars and transforming them into custom limousines. When we were younger he lived in his parents' garage and the concrete floor was carpeted with stolen restaurant welcome mats.

"Open winder please."

Stealing those rugs had been quite an operation involving multiple decoys and a getaway vehicle. After a few mishaps and several successful maneuvers, Friday's, Applebee's and Denny's logos filthy with heavy foot traffic covered the bedroom half of that garage. A work-in-progress limo-to-be usually occupied the other half.

"Bite down. Does that feel even?"

The welding torches and soldering irons he used on the cars doubled as glass-blowing tools. Dylan was an incredible glass worker and had sold his work at every head shop in the area. Most artists with his level of skill are professionally trained and his clients usually assumed he was a middle man. The thought of his unrecognized abilities makes me angry and sad. I start to feel my throat tighten.

"This new adhesive dries right away, so you won't have to wait to eat."

I leave the office make the short trip to Mark's apartment. The low fuel light chimes on. I ignore it and turn up the Sublime. The thought of running out of gas has no effect on me.

Mark's apartment has a red door and the "6" in the "516" is only present in the form of a sun stain. I am afraid to go in.

I found out about a year ago that I ought to consider Mark dead, but the reminders still make my ribs ache. I visited his old place, a studio in Boys' Town, last summer after a Redwalls concert at the Bottom Lounge. I found him tweaking on a solitary bare mattress with an emaciated girl who looked fifteen at most in a similar state at his side. Her name was Lilly. When I walked in he sat up and put out a few lines. Coked up, I lay back next to Lilly and Mark sat to my left improvising on his Les Paul. I thought about how he had sat to my left in sixth grade accelerated math and we had made comic strips about our teacher who we though looked like a hedge hog. I got up for a beer and found the sink filled with used syringes and cigarette butts. That was before Eric, Matt and now Dylan had died, but after Missy. It wasn't the norm yet, but I understood that death happened and who it happened to.

Back at 516, I swallow hard and knock. "Kimmy!" A warm hug and awkward scruffy kiss greet me. His teeth are jagged and discolored. His girl's black jeans are probably a size zero and his Van Morrison tee is covered by a thrift store blazer. I look past him into the apartment. It is bigger than the studio, but not any cleaner or more abundantly furnished. I see Amy sitting on the mattress. Her eyes are wide, her skin pocked with tiny abrasions. She smiles at me. "We were gonna smoke outta some of Dylan's pieces before the big show." I hadn't planned on being stoned at the funeral, but the gesture seems appropriate. I settle into the familiar mattress, my head on Amy's gurgling stomach. There are cigarette burns on the ceiling, and I pick up Amy's arm to see if the mark from her ex-lover's cigar is still in her wrist. Hidden under a scrap of bandana tied around her forearm it is gnarled and scratched. She jerks her arm away and pulls the cloth back down over her scar.

Mark comes back in the room with a green and blue dragon bubbler and a small pinkish pipe. He stuffs a wad of sharp smelling green pot into an indentation in the dragon's back. He offers Amy the first hit. She puts the hole in the beast's tail to her lips, flicks the lighter and inhales deeply. She sets the creature down and smoke streams languidly from its glass nostrils.

"This was the greatest piece he ever made. He just gave it to me last week, wouldn't take anything for it... Oh! He finally made you that pipe he promised you like forever ago." Mark gets up and comes back with a swirling yellow water pipe. He hands it to me and I drop it on the mattress. My heart drops with the pipe, but my pipe doesn't break.

Sufficiently high, Mark puts a few crystals into the pink pipe. He holds the meth in my direction but I shake my head. He shrugs. Mark and Amy take a few wheezing drags. We get into his dented Honda and I hope he is sober enough to get us to the funeral intact.

On the ride over we talk about how there are so many funeral parlors in Elgin, how weird it is that we are pseudo-adults, how Hemmingway is the best writer ever and how fucked up it is that Mrs. Maggiano has to bury another child. We start to laugh from the pot, and then I feel guilty. I see all the Burger King soda cups on Mark's car floor and I think about my psychopharmacology class back in Champaign. Dr. Gulley had talked about "meth mouth" and the debate about whether it was caused by the drug itself or by poor hygiene and all the Coke users tend to crave. I feel very removed and alone, realizing that I am the only one of us looking at this as a past rather than a present, a jumping off point rather than an end. I look at Amy and I know that she too is already dead.

We arrive at the Forsyth Funeral Home on East High Street. Amy and I make eye contact, acknowledging this little irony. An usher greets us at the door. "The viewing is currently underway in Room B and the service will start in about twenty-five minutes in Room A." Amy laces her fingers into mine.

In Room B I see Dylan's parents standing stoically by the far wall. Melissa is inured at this point. After Missy's suicide I don't think anything else will ever provoke a feeling in that woman. James looks the same as I remembered him: lean with a prominent jaw line. My stomach tightens and I feel a toxic loathing pulsing through my veins. The thought of him sweating over his daughter consumes me, and slip away to find a bathroom. Bent over the toilet I spot a jug of Drain-O on the floor. James is a plumber, so that very chemical was Missy's drug of choice when she took her life. I laugh a little: It is a good think I am already vomiting, because if I hadn't been I would be now. I feel the effects of the pot creeping up on me again.

In Room B a group of kids I used to know is huddled around what must be Dylan's body. Glad my stomach is empty I make my way across the room. The familiar faces all tell the same story. It is hard not to count upcoming funerals. A man named Jim who once kissed me in the Drama room after class puts his hand on the small of my back. I don't want to be touched, but I don't pull away. I get that same vulnerable, violated feeling I used to get when my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Tecktiel, would corner me by the coat rack in the nook in the back of the class room and put his fingers on my newly budding nipples.

Dylan looks like he has been dead for weeks. His cheeks are sunken and the makeup on his skin does not cover the dark yellow around his eyes. His hair is styled wrong, flipped up in the front rather than pulled together in the center as it is supposed to be. I see the scar under his hair above his right ear and think about the night he got it. It was the first time I had used ecstasy. Missy, Dylan, Mark and I had gone to a rave in a warehouse south of Joliet. Missy and I were leaning against an eight foot speaker rubbing each others backs, arms and heads. I remember thinking what a perfect tactile sensation human touch was. Dylan came up to us and his whole right shoulder was covered in blood. He said it was time to leave. I didn't feel scarred or unhappy. He had fallen while dancing, he said. I don't really know. We drove the sixty miles back to Elgin and snuck back into the Maggiano's house throw Missy's window. I never asked him what had really happened. I don't know that he would know.

"If everyone would please proceed into Room A, services will begin in five minutes."

I take a seat next to Amy and Sarah sits down on my other side. I remember the promise I made Sarah a few days prior. She had called me on Friday night. "Could you do me a huge favor? I know this may sound weird but Jason and I really like it when other people watch us have sex. Like you don't have to do anything or join or anything, but like would you be willing to do that?" I told her I would think about it, and probably would have declined, but when the news of Dylan's death came I figured I might as well. She looks at me and smiles. "Are we still on for later?" she mouths. I nod. Amy looks curious, and after she and Sarah whisper a bit it is decided that Amy and Mark will come over to Sarah and Jason's after the funeral as well. I feel like I have just scheduled a play date.

The priest stands at the front of the room. I hate Catholic funerals. I hate Catholic anything. The room utters an eerie opening prayer and the sound of the syncopated "s" when the crowd speaks the words "sin" and "salvation" is serpentine. The priest begins to talk about Dylan's life. He tries to excuse the drug problem and comfort mourners by telling us Dylan still has a chance to make it to his Heaven. He doesn't say a word about Dylan's ingenuity, his artistry, his brilliance, his loyalty. I am infuriated.

The woman in front of me isn't wearing black. She has an off white dress with a green floral pattern. It looks like the ivy border in my family's dining room. I want to wrap those linen vines around the priest's neck and tighten them until...

Amy nudges me. I realize I am seething audibly and stop. I try to pass it off as crying and listen to the priest, but my thoughts are on Missy. I feel guilty about that, but I don't try to re-focus. I smirk at the way the Catholic guilt still controls me. The pot has worn off by now. I haven't cried yet today.

Funeral processions are an odd ride. Traffic is stopped and our Honda follows a green Jeep without any effort. It feels like the fairy tale rides at Disney World where riders sit in a car they can not control and a foreign world passes by safely out of reach. We arrive at the graveyard. My hands and arms are no longer safely inside the vehicle. Amy takes my hands and laces her fingers in mine. It is late August and her hand is even colder than my own.

The people standing around the grave seem uncomfortable; we are young and unpracticed in the role of solemn mourner. While the priest is talking I am looking at the casket lowering apparatus. A green woven hammock of thick vinyl bands holds the casket and a complex arrangement of gears and pulleys are in place to lower it. Someone had to design, engineer and patent that contraption. I wonder if he was proud of his work, and how many other caskets that particular machine had lowered. Maybe one day it will lower someone who is looking at it now. Maybe it will take me on that final six foot journey.

People begin filing into a line and throwing handfuls of dirt on the grave. The sound is at first a clear pelting as clumps of dry earth shatter on the lacquered wood, but as more people make their contributions the sound fades into the muffled thumping of dirt hitting more dirt. I grab a handful and squish it down so the imprint of my fingers remains on the surface of the clump. Throwing it into the grave I feel like I am somehow defiling him. It seems so insulting. Hot angry tears well up in my eyes and I feel my nose start to run. Mark puts his hand on my shoulder and I shrug him off aggressively.

On the drive home Amy asks Mark to take her some place where she can scream as loud as she wants. He pulls into the quarry where we used to party in high school. Amy gets out and stands on the hood of the car, Mark and I join her. She takes a deep breath. "I don't think I can scream anymore. Let's just have a couple hits." I pass on another round of the pink pipe, but gladly accept the open bottle of cheap merlot that Mark holds in my direction. It tastes musty, like it has been open for several days and I immediately get an appreciated headache. Me heady and Mark and Amy high, we head to Sarah and Jason's apartment.