Past the side gate to the back yard, there’s a girl with a nose ring and a pink bang on one side that conveys a sense of effortless cool and belies the disaffected drawl in her tongue as she says, “it’s like, you know, more of a sense of cool, of style, like, I wanna be something, you know, but like, I don’t wanna work at it, so it’s like effortless, you know?” And we do know, because we’re all around the same bent picnic table, listening to the same hardcore growl over a disjointed thud of dance club gangsta rap that conflicts with the wall of hard rock shattering out the back door.

There’s a clothesline, and an inexplicable cream bra and a orange sweater with arms absurdly long and belly absurdly short, hung up at the right wrist, left dragging in the snow, not really drying at all, but absorbing a good deal of cigarette stench from the motley crew of smokers brave enough to dare this cold winter’s eve. Some shiver in their leather leather jackets and short skirts, some shiver in their bare chests, impervious to the pangs of winter through the shield of alcohol and other sundry drugs that float door to door through the party like a plastic pumpkin on Hallowe’en night.

“It’s like, the new sound,” says someone, instantly refuted by someone else.

“It’s like, me, me, me, and terribly boring,” the someone else says. “I’m better than you, girls are objects that want my dick and I got money, die, die, motherfucker. We’re better than that, don’t you think?”

But the other one doesn’t think, and the friend of the girl with the pink hair who is jealous of her effortless cool, and more than a little envious of her figure, and the extra twenty she doesn’t have, says she thinks the rapper’s kind of hot, but no one’s really paying attention to her, except the boy with no shirt, who says something about big girls and black guys and the girl with the pink hair says “you’re fucking racist”, and the girl with the extra twenty thinks, and sexist and mean for calling me fat, but she doesn’t say that and Pink Bang doesn’t even think it and later on that night, Pink Bang will find herself back in the corner of the yard against the shed running a painted nail down the boy’s bare chest to his nipple, as she tells him about a movie she saw, and casually drops that it was deep, and harsh and pretty sexy, if she’s real about it, to which she bites her bottom lip and he smiles at her knowingly, only it’s not really knowingly, it’s only sort of knowingly, because he’s had way too much to drink, and alcohol and THC are the contents of his veins and he’s mostly using the shed to hold himself up.

Twenty Pounds gives up and sits down on the patio table, and the shy boy in the corner whose name is probably Lewis or maybe Levi, gets up and goes inside. He’s barely in the door when a bottle blond throws her arms around him, and says she’s glad he came, and he’s hoping he doesn’t (cum), because she’s never been this close to him before and he can feel her pressing up against his chest and his mind goes into lockdown, and she says, Joey’s in the basement, and Levi/Lewis (larson?) thinks Joey?, like he should know Joey? and he does know Joey?, but not really well enough for the girl to inform him that Joey?’s in the basement, because his plans don’t include Joey?, they include the blonde, and only the blonde, and a walk on a boardwalk by the ocean, holding hands and sharing ice cream, furtive glances, nervous titters and eventually, a moonlit kiss at the end of a pier. There’s a number of other lurid fantasies as well, but he’d prefer to keep those to himself.

He certainly doesn’t want to involve Joey. Joey?

He’s better than that, right?

And she gestures to him to go downstairs, to go, to hurry, to stop wasting time and git, and he starts to go down and he’s a third of the way down, two-thirds of the way down, when he realizes she’s not behind him. The stairs open to a wide, old school, wood-panelled room with a standing bar separated by wooden balusters and a green fridge and blue-red shag and a drum kit, behind which the owner of the house (by proxy of a single mother who works midnights/weekends and doesn’t have time for this shit, and so, doesn’t care, because she had four cardiac arrests and a goddamn methhead freakout in her ward and she’s fucking exhausted, kid, and someone says, i’d never work that hard, and Lewis/Larson/Levi isn’t sure who said it, but one of the stoner kids in the corner stares at him, and Lewis is convinced for a moment the boy’s a telepath.)

Proxy-owner is also shirtless, which is a recurring theme as a girl with frizzy hair cuts the sleeves off the telepath’s t-shirts, while the other one, the stoner with the laidback surfer cool and the handsome grace of the permanently fried, holds out a Red Delicious to the wondrous eyes of his enraptured compatriots. Proxy-owner sits behind a drum kit and launches forward, pounding, with eyes closed, a malevolent and defeaning cacophony of snare and bass, cymbal and rim, with a fervour equal to a headline act at Woodstock ’99 or Glastonbury or Boot + Hearts and then stops, arching back on his stool in a religious trance, a prophet descended into the bowels of this two story and a basement in the lower end of town, but not the lowest end, that’s a few streets away, where windows are slatted boards and the only indication of occupancy are graffiti tags and shadows that sneak in and out of the back door, offering cash for play, or a mouth in lieu. Proxy-owner peaks and falls forward, a badumpbump smash hitting the rim as he hunches, sticks clutched tight, eyes squeezed shut, a trail of drool hanging gossamer from his bottom lip. He will pass out there, but not before going upstairs and finding the main floor bathroom locked, and piss in the front hallway on everyone’s shoes. His mother will cuff him upside the head and curse him up and down as she drags him from bed the next morning to clean it. He will remember that moment as he holds down the beat as the opener for the opener of the headliner of his grand Prairie break, and then again, when he’s strung out and failing, in a dive bar in East York twenty years after that. He will blame circumstance; reality will have other opinions.

Stoner pops the stem out of the Red Delicious and produces a flathead screwdriver from his back pocket. He digs a shallow hole in the top of the apple, just enough to pack, then drives the screwdriver like a drill down the centre of the Red Delicious, as his companions, themselves cardboard cutout characters who will one day go on to be a big shot lawyer and a car wash attendant (and definitely not a telepath), ooh and ahh. Stoner drives the screwdriver once more into the side of the Red Delicious, bores through to the centre shaft, and giggles, as chewed up Red Delicious flesh sinks into the red-blue shag.

“Oooh,” says future lawyer of America.

“Ahh,” says future couch potato (and non-telepath) of Idaho.

Stoner tests the airflow, pops a third hole, the flow hole, he calls its, as lawyer and carwash nod in awe. Stoner packs the apple. Lewis/Leonard/Leandro’s curiosity is piqued, though he’s only smoked pot once in his life, and coughed until his lungs hurt and his face became non-functional, his limp tongue limp having lost the ability to do anything but swerve side to side in his mouth, a mouth weirdly dry and clammy. A miasma of spinning lights twinkled his head, and he was pretty sure if he couldn’t do math anymore. 2+2=holyfucki’mfuckinstoned. The apple is lit, Maui Wowie by way of Kona Crush and Red Delicious, and it’s a hit that would probably kill Lewis/Larson, but lawyer/carwash are duly impressed, and they drawn their own bliss, and Stoner gets up with a permanent smile, and slips behind the drumset and puts Red Delicious to Proxy-owner’s lips, who sucks back on it as though he knew it was there the whole time, even though he hadn’t moved or opened his eyes for several minutes. Then it’s Leonard’s turn, and he’s not really into it, it’s not his scene and he thinks about bottle blonde and remaining coherent enough to express feelings, and the girl with the frizzy hair dips past, this not really being her scene either and she wants to put the scissors back where she found them. She’s wondering if the cut off t-shirt sleeves would make good headbands, as she passes Twenty Pounds, who complains to Pink Bang about why is Shirtless such a jerk, and Pink Bang blows it off as him being drunk, and makes a half-hearted joke about abs, which is what she’s really thinking about, and how later on, she’s going to draw one painted nail down across his nipple and run her fingers across his abs to his…

Frizzy thinks maybe she could be a fashion designer, as she stretches one of the cut-off arms around her head, giving her an Eighties aerobics class feel, which only occurs to her for a second before she accidentally pokes herself in the head with the scissors and then says, “shit” and checks if she’s bleeding, somewhat obsessively, but she’s not, but she’ll ask ten other people anyway, and walk around with the scissors in her hand most of the night. Later, she’ll convince Twenty Pounds to let her cut Twenty Pound’s hair, to give her bangs like Pink Bang, but Twenty Pounds will chicken out at the last minute, like she’ll chicken out of everything at the last minute and deny herself adventures and jobs and boyfriends and one night stands that she might have enjoyed if life weren’t so faught with terrifying risk.

And Lovelorn (which is what we call Leonard/Leroy/Larva now) comes up the stairs, no longer thrilled to watch intoxicated idiots hoot oil off a hot knife superheated on an electric stove, and he searches for Blondie, who we’re calling Blondie now, and scans Pink Bang and registers the attractivenes of her effortless cool, and doesn’t realize Twenty Pounds is there, even though he has to squeeze past her at the top of the stairs, and he stops at Frizzy when she asks, “am I bleeding?” and peels back the cut-off t-shirt around her head and he replies, “I don’t think so,” and then wonders whatever happened to Joey, and who was Joey (?) again, and shit, that’s a contact high, damn it, every week, shit, and a boy with spiked hair and studs on his wrists throws his arm around Lovelorn’s shoulder and tells Frizzy, “yeah, out your vagina, once a month” when she asks, “am I bleeding?” and snatches one of the t-shirt headbands from her and stuffs it over his face.

“I’m gonna tell her,” Lovelorn says, and Studs says “what? Tell who?” and Lovelorn’s all girl, and Spike looks behind him where Girl (what we now call Blondie) is on the couch, way too close to Football Guy, who no one knows who (is that whom?) he knows that he would be here, but he’s got a thick hand on Blondie’s blue-jeaned thigh and it inches ever upward and that’s what we’re calling her now.

“I’m gonna tell her,” Lovelorn repeats.

Outside the back door, someone’s erected a snowman and given it a carrot for a dick.

“I’m gonna tell her,” he says once again.

“Well, fuckin’ fuck, then, man,” Studs shoves Lovelorn forward, as Blondie heads toward the kitchen leaving a confused and irritated Football Guy behind on the couch.

“Fuckin’ prick tease,” he says to no one in particular. The other two girls at the end of the couch make a face like someone dropped a steamer in their gene pool and leave. The room empties, and Football Guy shrugs. His hand dips behind the couch, pops the top on a fresh can of light beer, and wonders how he got there in the first place. Oh, right, he thinks. Football’s going nowhere and Dad wants me to be a cop. He chugs the beer whole, and grabs another.

The two girls with the wry faces bump Lovelorn on the way past and Studs raises his eyebrows.

“I’m gonna have a threesome,” he says, to no one in particular.

“I”m gonna tell her,” Lovelorn replies. Studs disappears after the two girls, who mount the stairs away from the bump and grind of teenage zeitgeist, and the mix of dance and rock, rap and distortion, heavy crashing bass and heavy crashing drums (mostly from the basement, where Proxy-owner has resumed his Concert at Red Rocks), to seek peace and quiet in an upstairs bathroom. They’ll later become lovers, in a moment of great despair, and it will cause them to never speak again, as one discovers something new about her essential self, and the other finds herself disgusted by her own obscenity. She’ll turn Conservative with a capital C, and decide she hates black people and Jews as a result. She’ll also hate her husband and her children. The other will lean too hard into lesbian tropes, and turn every flirtation into marriage.

“I’m gonna tell her,” Lovelorn says again.

“So fuckin’ do it,” Football Guy slaps him on the back and sways drunkenly. He stabs a beer with a pocket knife and shotguns it. “I did.”

Beer dribbles over the floor. No one will remember the stain later, after Proxy-owner pees on the shoes.

Lovelorn is propelled into the kitchen, where Blondie talks with Brunette, who looks Lovelorn up and down like he’s something that got plopped in her gene pool.

“Do you have a minute?” Lovelorn asks Blondie.

“Oh fuck, here we go,” Brunette rolls her eyes. “Try not to kill him.”

She leaves and we follow, as Football Guy follows, and Studs follows two girls to the second floor and Red Delicious comes up from the basement and screams, “I am a golden god!” Someone tells him to shut the fuck up, because that’s from a movie and why was Shirtless so fucking rude about being thirty pounds overweight and Frizzy put a fucking t-shirt arm on the snowman’s head and now it looks like it’s born with craniosynostosis (how do we know that word?), and why is Pink Bang against the shed with Shirtless, and oh my God, what are those guys pretending to do with that carrot. Is that guy wearing a bra?

The thud of drums continues unabated, as Lovelorn stumbles out of the kitchen, having been let down gently, easily, and not at all clearly, and he goes on his merry way, mildly dissatisfied, but still convinced he has a shot, and maybe he could relax and pour himself a celebration, so he finds something hard on the counter, drowns it in Pepsi and takes a sip.

In the living room, a girl in a cigarette-stenched orange sweater with arms too long and belly too short, drying solely from the heat of her braless torso, stumbles and rights herself and holds a red Solo cup up to the sky and says, “When I graduate, I’m gonna fucking go wild, man. I’m gonna go to college and go wild and fuck everyone and everything, and get drunk, and get high and do drugs, and go to school and man, I’m gonna be the fuckin’ president or some shit, president of the fuck club, and the drug club and everyone’s gonna want a piece of this,” she rants, as her midriff-baring sweater, still with too long arms and too wet and cold fabric, lifts and bares bellybutton, creating a hypnotic state for the lazy-eyed boy whose rarely ever comes to these things, but is nicely toasted, and didn’t realize that was Molly and he watches the bellybutton dance across as smooth flat stomach, surrounded by fine down, and it’s a watch swung back and forth and Freud saying, “Fuckin’ go to sleep”, and it’s all he do not to reach out and poke it with his finger.

“Dude! Those chicks are totally into it,” Studs grabs his crotch as he slides down the bannister. “I’m definitely gonna have a threesome, and then, for the rest of my life, I’m gonna be threesome guy.”

“The fuck, weirdo! You poked my belly!”

“I think when you die, you don’t go to like, heaven or hell or whatever. Like, who wants to go to heaven? Sit around, playing harps and worshipping some old dude on a throne? Booooring. And hell, like whatever, man, we know it sucks. I think when you die, you get to like, answer every question you ever had that you never got to answer. Did that person really talk shit about me? Were they a real friend? Are aliens real? What’s it like on another planet? What’s it like to dirt bike or sky dive and really live it, you know?”
“Dude, that’s fuckin’ awesome,” says Red Delicious, on whose shoulder Bottle Blonde is resting her chin (yes, we’re back to that). “I’d get to, like, lay every hot chick I ever saw, like that girl I sketched from the bus downtown? Killer ass.”

“You know you could dirt bike and sky dive now,” adds Studs. “Or have a threesome.”

He waggles his eyes at Bottle Blonde.

“That’s not what I meant,” replied Curly Redhead, who to this point in our story, has only hung out in the kitchen, having quiet conversations about death and life and philosophy in the shadows, and who got stuck there awkwardly watching Lovelorn’s girl tell Lovelorn that he’s got a shot, maybe in the future, but now, she’s not looking for anything serious, like she’s played out with the games and boys, and for now, she only wants a friend, but you know, stick around, friends sometimes grow into things, but mostly not, she warned gravely.

“Like, what would sex be like with some random chick I saw walking down the street but couldn’t talk to, ‘cuase I was on the bus? Could I smoke a bowl out of her crack? Does she like it in the..?”

“It’s not your personal fucking Shangri-La, dork. It’s heaven. The afterlife. You could like, know what Einstein knew, or if they were all in on it, or what it’s like to be super rich. I bet they have the best parties.”

“Or if she likes it in the…”

Lovelorn goes outside, where he bums a smoke off Thirty Pounder, and then thinks he hasn’t done this in a while, and how come this didn’t make him cough like that weed did, and man, he can’t believe she told him he had a shot. He’s going to profess his love. He knows it. He also knows he’s going to profess his love to Pink Bang by the shed, who runs a long nail down Shirtless’s chest onto his abs, but that’s mostly a sex thing and not a holding hands by the ocean thing, and Forty Pounder is also thinking about Shirtless’s abs and what she might think about them later, when she gets home, if she’s sober enough to stake awake, and what it would be like to be married to someone like that, and not just a chemistry major with freckles and fifty pounds too many.

“It’s cold out.”

“I can’t believe where he stuck that carrot.”

“I’m going to profess my love.”

“To who?”

“You know.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“What do you mean? We’re here like every week.”

“Yeah, but we don’t talk. You drool over Blondie and Pink Bang, and when that doesn’t work out, come talk to me. Where is Blondie anyway?”

And Lovelorn goes inside, steps over Football Guy drooling in the hall, who says, “no, you’re not bleeding” to Frizzy Hair, and Proxy-owner smashes his head on the snare, and Redhead tells a new guy about the afterlife of knowledge, and new guy says, “I could never work that hard. It’d be like being stuck in a museum,” and someone says, “yeah, a museum of sex,” and that’s Studs, and Proxy-owner comes up the stairs and pounds on the main floor bathroom after he finds it’s locked and screams, “I gotta go!” before whipping out his penis and peeing all over the shoes, and he bangs on the door again, over and over, heavy pounding rhythms like the ones he plays on the drum, and screams, “I gotta go!” even though he’s already gone, all over the shoes, and then the door bursts open by accident, because but the latch wasn’t latched, and Lovelorn stares in and there’s Lovelorn’s girl (blondie) on her knees, and Red Delicious, eyeballs rolled back in his head, and something drips out of the side of Blondie’s mouth, cum runs out the corner of her mouth and she scream-gurgles and rushes out the bathroom and up the stairs, and someone says to Red Delicious (probably Redhead), “you’re dripping on the bathmat” and Red Delicious chuckles and locks eyes with Proxy-owner, whose penis is also out from peeing on the shoes, and they laugh and pull up their pants and Redhead stores the memory of cum dripping from Red Delicious’ dick for later and wonders if in heaven, she could find out what that was like.

“You could find out now, when you’re done dirt biking and sky diving,” says Studs helpfully, and Redhead wonders briefly if he’s a telepath.

Lovelorn’s girl bursts through the upstairs bathroom door, where two girls from the living room (who will have a brief and passionate encounter that dovetails both of the lives into something entirely else) have gone to hide from Studs and his threesome, and Football Guy and his misogyny, and Lovelorn’s girl spits up cum in the sink and the girls scream, “oh my god, she’s puking!”

“Oh my god, I’m going to throw up!”

And

“Oh my god!”, followed by blech, and another scream and Lovelorn stands in the hallway downstairs, unable to articulate exactly what he’s just witnessed and Redhead says, “that’s fucked” and Studs says, “I guess we’ll find out in the afterlife”, and Frizzy Hair thinks about launching a t-shirt headband line, which she’ll do, for real, before deciding it’s too hard and it’s more fun to eat bonbons on the couch and let her husband rut in her every Friday night. Lovelorn’s girl tumbles down the stairs and trips into her peed-on shoes and out the front door and Lovelorn jumps into his pee-soaked shoes and follows out into the cold with wet shoes and the dreams of a generation blooming like unfertilized eggs and not yet fully formed humans and all of this will end up different, because of laziness or circumstance or trauma or sideways movement and someone else’s will and political events and all of that is here and now and possible all at the same time, and we’ll find out later, as Lovelorn watches as his girl (his friend for the foreseeable future) runs away, as the night sky watches her run away, and he thinks, I should go after her, but doesn’t move and thinks, I should go after her, and his feet get cold in his pee-wet shoes.

He stands until she’s long gone, imagining kisses and futures and cum at the corner of her lips, and the chill in the air and the competing bass and Pink Bang, and how none of them will ever be what they are, and even knowing that, he thinks, I’m going to profess my love.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1551 words, novel: Father Lightning

Read: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Comics: Team 7 3-4, Gen 13 v2 1, Gen 13: Rave 1
Music: 74 Jailbreak, AC/DC