Blazed (10 page)

Why?

Cos I just do. Why are you so fucking resistant, man? I'm hot.

This makes me smile, and I write,
I know you are
.

So what's your problem?

I don't trust you.

You don't know me yet.

No,
I write back.
I don't trust you in general. I don't trust girls. I've never met one who wasn't evil.

Dominique texts back a sad face, and I shut my phone off when I start thinking about how nice she's being to me.

THE REST OF THE NIGHT:
It sucks. I miss my mother. I won't be able to talk to her for three more days. Dinner was weak. I said, like, three words and took two bites of the BLT that Leslie made. I also found out that Leslie teaches art history at the Academy of Art University. Also that neither her nor my father have talked to Kristen since last night. And that my father is “super bummed” and “totally frustrated” that his yearlong suspension from all Academy of Art property in the city was upheld after an appeal.

“It's so ridiculous,” he fumed at the table. “The professor I punched doesn't even work there anymore. They fired him at the end of the semester. I mean, the jerk was being such an asshole to everyone that night. He was so smashed. His shirt was untucked, and his gut was showing. And he's the one who got all crazy after I laughed at him for bragging about being backstage at some Jack Johnson show in Hawaii. He totally lost his cool. Not me.
He
poked me in the chest and asked me if I had a problem with Jack Johnson. He started it. I mean,
he
was bragging about Jack Johnson. I wasn't the only one who was laughing either. And when he poked me again, like sorry, like all bets are off at that point. I never
thought I'd break his nose. Hell, that grundle pig outweighs me by a hundred and fifty pounds. Who knew he'd drop like that? So fuck him and fuck the ruling,” my father snarled. “And fuck Jack Johnson, too.”

I excused myself before Leslie or my father had a chance to see me smile because of that story, and laugh because of that story.

Back in my room, I spent two hours chatting on Gmail with some kids who follow my Tumblr. Then I uploaded the poem from my walk home from school yesterday. After that, I smoked half an Oxy and read some poems by Frank O'Hara.

Around eleven, I tried to jack off but I never came. Three times, I worked myself up to the verge of ejaculation only to stop because the scenes in my head weren't the scenes I wanted to come to.

The image of my mother's stained body just won't leave. It comes in flashes, and I can still feel her sweat on my skin, and smell her vomit. Smell the iron in the puddles of her blood.

After I viewed all the comments my poem had already received, I deleted them. That's when I heard my father and Leslie go into their bedroom down the hall. The smell of dope then filled the air. I could hear them laughing and coughing and coughing some more. They listened to Pulp, the Violent Femmes, and Mazzy Star.

And then the house got still.

I left my room with a piece of foil, a whole baby blue, and my notebook.

Down in the kitchen now, I write the first page of a screenplay about a boy who robs a liquor store to buy a crate full of rare Smiths B sides and signed LCD Soundsystem records and the entire Nirvana catalog signed as well. Then he buys a one-way ticket to Baltimore to see a Future Islands show and ends up living on the floor of the apartment of one of the members of Beach House for a week.

I immediately throw the page away after I've written the last word on it. Then I grab this bottle of red wine from the kitchen counter and a wine opener from a drawer, and go downstairs because I haven't been down here yet.

It's so fucking nice. A huge part of me wants to smash everything down here. To break everything, throw it in the middle of the floor, and piss all over it. This chick isn't even my father's biological kid and her space is nicer than the house me and my mother have been living in for most of my life.

It's so wrong to me, but it's not her fault. Besides, I don't want anything from that bastard. My mother told me once that sometimes he'd ask her to dress up like a super-young girl, a young teen, and let him pretend that he was raping her.

When I asked her why she told me this, her face got white and she looked like she was going to be sick.

When I pressed her about it, she fumed, “Because you
need to understand how evil this man is. I'm not going be around forever, Jaime. If something happens, he will try and swoop in for you. He'll try and fuck your girlfriend, and she'll probably let him.”

There are two black leather couches down here and two black leather reclining chairs. There's a record player and four stand-up speakers. Just like in the living room, a large flat-screen television hangs from a wall. I see an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Crates of records are stacked against another wall. There's a refrigerator down here.

But the most interesting thing are the six racks of clothes and shoes, each one at least fifteen feet long, that occupy the back half of the basement. Two of the racks are full of tops. One rack is full of bottoms. One rack is full of dresses, all kinds of sweet, pretty dresses.

My eyes are drawn immediately to this peach-colored sundress with these four white squares on the front. There's a certain unflattering innocence about it. The color makes me feel calm, but the dress itself has an aura of shame and guilt, too. Like this is the dress a girl wears on a date with some older boy who finally asked her out after she grew some tits. It's the same dress that girl wears when she loses her virginity in the backseat of some shitty Honda that smells like Newport cigarettes and Boone's Farm wine while a Jewel song plays from the speakers. It's the dress that soaks secretly in a bucket of warm water the next morning to get out all the blood that wasn't there before she got fucked.

I run my hand down it slowly before crunching the hem in my fist. I hold it up to my nose and bite down on it. I imagine the brutality of the girl putting this dress back on a month later for a date with another boy, a nice boy this time, a boy who will call and make plans to see her again, a boy who won't high-five his stupid friends and laugh every time he sees her, a boy who'll have to wait a long time before he gets to push up the bottom of this dress in a dark room because somebody has to be punished; somebody has to pay for a simple girl's disastrous foray into the false, bright spotlight.

I let go of the dress and turn away.

There's a bathroom down here, and Kristen's bedroom is across from it. The door is locked, though.

A picture of Basquiat is taped to it.

Pulling my tank top off, I walk over to the record player, and this is when I spot the acoustic guitar leaning next to a stack of crates.

I pick it up and sit down on the couch. It's a beautiful fucking piece too. A Gibson Hummingbird that's so clean. That looks like it's barely been touched, let alone used. If I had decided to turn this basement upside down and ruin its existence, I would've saved this.

I woulda also saved the stack of first pressing Replacement records and first pressing D'Angelo records that were sitting out.

Other things I woulda saved: This pair of sick fucking boots on one of the racks. This amazing poster of Madonna
from the
Bedtime Stories
album. The
Pusher
film collection on DVD that's lying a few feet from me. And I woulda carefully peeled off the Basquiat picture and folded it perfectly and slid it into my wallet.

I pop my notebook open to continue working on my song, “Black Vulture.”

I tune the guitar.

While I do, I think about the last forty-eight hours and how fucking insane they've been. My life has totally changed forever. Like, nothing will be the same as it was. That call from my mother in the middle of the night fucking altered my world the way a tornado destroys everything in its path once it touches the earth.

It's like James Morgan said a few months ago in an interview. Most of his books, they all take place over a week or so, but they're all superthick. All of them four hundred pages or more.

He was asked about that in the interview. Why they were so long when other writers can span a year in two hundred pages? And Morgan immediately rolled his eyes, wiped his nose, then laughed, before naming off everything he'd done in the last twenty-four: taking a shower with his chick and balling her in the butt before she moved the rest of her shit out of his apartment, scoring ten handfuls of pills, flying to New York and pissing his pants midflight after falling into a Xanax coma, having drinks with Selena Gomez to discuss a script he was developing for her to star in, him receiving
an all-access pass to the M83 show later that night, making plans to go to the show with James Murphy, hanging out at
Vice
headquarters so they could tape him reading his short story “Fisting You on Your Boyfriend's Couch,” which is from his short story book,
Where the Mean Girls Are
, buying a new pair of Asics and grabbing a burrito with Zachary German, and then finally getting to the studio where the interview was taking place and changing into the new suit he'd bought the day before, then talking to Chloë Sevigny on the phone for a half hour and text bombing Earl Sweatshirt.

“Point being,” he said, grinning ear to ear, “there's a ton of fucking shit that can happen in a day. Important shit. Seminal shit. And I like to think about all of it and crib those details.”

Dude's a fucking hero.

Once the guitar is tuned, I drop my blue heaven onto the foil and spend the next thirty seconds chasing the dragon.

When my eyes open, I'm back in the castle.

I open the bottle of wine and take a pull. It's really good too. Like, I've never tasted wine as good as this and I've drunk lots of wine in my short life. I was twelve the first time I got drunk. I puked. At first my mother thought I was puking blood, and freaked out until she realized it was red wine. She grounded me for a week, but then undid the grounding two days later when she got wasted while shopping and needed me to bike to the mall to drive her home.

I count off and begin playing.

First verse:

“Black vulture, black vulture, gliding through the sky, black vulture, black vulture, he's going for a ride . . . remains and death, doom in the air, black vulture gonna smell you, black vulture doesn't care . . . Cos he's a lurker, he sits and waits, to get what he wants, he knows his time is coming, he knows he's gonna shine, black vulture don't care, black vulture's gonna feed, black vulture's flying high, just waiting till you die . . .”

Second verse:

“Moving down the coast, these sunny warm days, the remains of our memories, buried in a grave, I thought I saw her in Texas, I thought I saw her die, I thought I saw her in Portland, I knew I'd made her cry, wings spreading wide, cutting through the wind, black vulture's gonna catch you, gonna swallow all your sins . . .”

Bridge:

“Those sticks and stones, gonna break them lovely bones, feeding on your misery, stealing your ivory throne . . . he breaks into your dreams, he lives in your shadow, laughing at your simple life, he's winning all the battles . . .”

I play what I have three times before setting the guitar down and chasing the dragon some more. I've
become better at playing the guitar than the piano, which means I've become really fucking good.

In the last six months, I've self-recorded and produced six songs under the name Tiger Stitches. The first two were called “Cuddling” and “Blood Zebra.” I used a drum machine I stole from this place called the Instrument Center. Me and my mother used to go there all the time. My two electric guitars, my bass, and both amps were purchased there. So were my two keyboards and my sampler. I used to love that place. Then the store manager, this fucking crusty loser who wore tie-dye shirts, baggy pants, and shorts and sandals, exposed himself to my mother. He cornered her in his office after she used the restroom while we were there once. He groped her and told her he'd give her a thousand dollars' worth of free gear if she gave him a blow job.

She laughed in his gross, fat face, and he kicked us out of the store.

Two weeks later I jacked the drum machine right from under that dude's double chin. He never got that hummer, but we got that free gear.

Anyway, I named the drum machine Coady after my favorite drummer in the world, Coady Willis (Murder City Devils, Big Business), and over an eight-hour session one night, I recorded the two songs, and then mixed them on my computer using Ableton.

At first I was pretty bummed about the sound quality. You could tell it was recorded in a garage with no
soundproofing. Also, the fucking cops showed up three times. Not only did they finally write a ticket for the noise on their last visit, my mother was super wasted and threw an egg at their squad car when they were pulling out of the driveway, which resulted in two additional tickets. One for vandalism. And one for public intoxication (after she threw the egg, she ran after the car and stepped off the property for, like, three seconds).

Whatever.

I didn't think it was funny at the time but right now, sure, it's making me smile pretty big because it reminds me of how much she can care when she wants to.

After, like, a week of debating it with myself, I finally decided to release the songs. I created Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Facebook accounts and uploaded the tracks. I fucking spread my beautiful filth all over the web, posting links to the pages, like, six times a day on my Tumblr, my regular Facebook, and my Twitter. Then I e-mailed the songs to at least three hundred media outlets. I just fucking pressed that shit onto people, because that's what you have to do. Like, it's insane how accessible your art can be to people now. I could start a band tomorrow and a week from now, we can release a digital mix tape or an EP and have a thousand fucking listeners from all over the world a few days later. That's some beautiful shit right there. A totally built-in advantage that my generation has over any other generation.