It was a Wednesday night because on Wednesday nights me and Joe were always at the trailer, freezer-burned on coke, confessing all manner of sins.
We’d numb our faces and boil our brains until the truth foamed out of our mouths like scalded milk. You’d always want to keep the lid on but you’d always end up with a crusty mess you couldn’t clean up for love or money. Dead giveaway was if one of us started crying or got a nosebleed. When you get both blood and water coming out, you can tell for goddamn sure that somebody’s telling the truth.
Last time it was a truth I told to some girl about some other girl. Never make a phone call when you’re high. Got me kicked out of our lush apartment and over into Joe’s shithole trailer. Before we’d just kick off Fridays or certain work functions by getting all tooted up. But now that me and him were roommates, we’d start every weekend three days early and high as hell. OK, confession: It’s also how we spent the workweek. We were both Top 40 disc jockeys. We had fake names. We could talk as fast as we wanted.
What was new on this Wednesday night, the last Wednesday before Christmas, is that we hatched a plan. Usually we’d just be freeze-drying our sinuses until we run out of blow and one of us started crying. Usually we just talk about how awesome we are right now and how great we’re gonna be by 1984, but there’s never any plan at all, no clear path forward. Nothing ever drops into gear. But to be fair, I didn’t so much hatch this plan as sit back and watch it hatch. It was Joe’s plan. Credit where credit’s due. So the plan was, he says to me, the plan is that—well there was this guy who had a stereo sitting under his Christmas tree still in the box and Joe was gonna steal it.
To be fair, Joe’s not a full-time criminal. He just likes doing crimes. I mean we’re both full-time disc jockeys. Crimes are just for Joe and only on the weekends. Joe had to move this particular crime up a couple days this week on account of Christmas.
So we were doing blow off of the backs of his cheap-ass Chinet plates because he didn’t want to scratch up any of his beer mirrors like the Budweiser one or that one Miller mirror, the one that was really nice. He looks up at me in the middle of this rail he’s doing that’s about the size of a Toblerone and says that he hatched a plan whereby —
Okay, there was this kid named Driver. I mean, Driver wasn’t his real name. That’s what he did. He loved Joe’s old Fairlane like crazy, always washing and polishing and practically dry-humping the thing. We’d have him drive us when we were all loaded and didn’t feel like getting a DUI. We were already local-famous. Now we had our own fucking chauffer. He’d drive us to that laser disco and wait for us in the car. That had to be just fucking awful especially that time of year. It’s thirty some odd below. He had to be freezing his tits off. But hey. His choice.
Other important note: Driver was straight up ugly as a shit fence. I mean I of all people, with my face the way it is, know from ugly, right? But —it was crazy—he always had these really cute girls around. He’d bring them by our trailer. They were always up in the extra bedroom with his homely ass. Every once in a while when they got tired of him or he ran out of coke before we did, they’d come out and flirt us up. They’d come out and flirt Joe up, anyway.
There was this one girl I remember this one time, she came and hung out with me in the living room while Joe was banging her friend in the other room. It was really funny. She goes, What’s that on your face? I said, It’s a port wine stain. She goes, Ew. What? Then I put it in my radio voice. A port wine stain: a vascular anomaly consisting of dilated capillaries in the skin which produce a purplish discoloration. Exhibit A as you see here extends from the hairline to the mandible and across the nose and left eye and resembles the country of Uruguay. If you look closely, you can even see Laguna Merin on the Uruguay-Brazil border. She goes, You’re weird. And I say, Yeah, I know, I’ve been told I have the face for radio.
Kind of a sweet deal for Joe, though having Driver, the seventeen year old pimp-chauffer.
So, anyway, back to where we were. Me and Joe we’re doing like fucking Tony Montana amounts of blow and he looks at me and he says, Driver. And I’m like What and he’s like I’ll get Driver to go get that stereo and bring it back here. I’ll just pay him to steal it.
Other important note: I had an aunt who was a cop. A full-on cop in the police department, with like a gun that she actually shot somebody with and a badge and stuff. We’d only known each other a couple three or four years because she was a distant relative. I don’t mean distant bloodline-wise. She was my dad’s sister. I mean distant like she had always lived three thousand miles away my whole life. But then I got sent up here after my parents lost custody so that made her and my cousin close relatives. She was even my guardian for a while, so that made her more my parent than my parents. Place all that geometry in your nugget for later. Hereafter, I will call her Auntie Po-Po.
Joe’s all I’ll have driver steal it and just pay him, like, a couple hundred. And I’m like, Okay man, that’s all you. So Joe gets on the blower and goes, Driver! Get your supple butt over here! Joe said that Driver was just like us, another motherless child, and talking to him that way made him feel loved and wanted. He says, I have a job for you.
Thing is Joe coulda bought his own damn stereo if he (and by he I mean he and I meaning we) did not spend so much money on drugs. It’s just that buying all that blow made hard-working young men like us low on cash and that was what made it necessary to steal. I mean Jesus. Me alone, I spent I think eighteen thousand in 1983 dollars per year on blow. I remember that number because it was the MSRP of a brand new BMW 318i back then. You wouldn’t steal groceries and stuff because Ramen was only a dime and Kraft Mac & Cheese was a quarter. What else do you need besides maybe a four dollar half rack of Schmidt to make it through the week? But you know when it comes to the luxuries, like the guy’s stereo that was about to get stolen, it’s not something that he really needs. If he doesn’t really need it you can take it, right? Not like you’re taking his dialysis machine or something. Besides, a dialysis machine is way too hard to fence. Just ask Joe.
Driver comes over and Joe gives him the money. Driver takes off. Then there’s nothing to do except do more blow and silently freak out until Driver gets back with the stereo. And that’s all we do, except like I said, when you’re all high on coke it’s hard to keep quiet. So I start reading the newspaper out loud and singing along with MTV.
That doesn’t stop Joe from asking me about my cousin. He asks me about my cousin all the time. She’s shit hot, like Debra Winger hot, he says. Think she’d do it?
Hands off, I say. Don’t be a dick, I say. Her mom’s on the force, remember? She fucking shot somebody once. You wanna be on the judicial end of a service revolver? You know she shot that guy in the face twice. The guy with the wife he was beating on. She is the cobalt curtain. She will crush you.
You get so testy, he says. It’s like you’re fucking her or something.
I ask Joe what happened to that girl. He said, What girl. I said, The girl you had over here while I was house sitting at Auntie Po-Po’s last night. D’ja fuck’er?
He says She wanted me to tie her up and stick my .45 in her mouth.
I was like Shit, really? Did you?
He was like, Are you kidding? No. I’m not crazy. I have standards. I told her to get lost. She still wouldn’t go away.
So what did you do?
I waited until she went to bed and fell asleep and I peed on her. She freaked out and went running out into the snow and I haven’t seen her since.
You peed on her in your own bed?
Oh hell no, I peed on her in your bed.
Before I can call him a stinky fucking fuck for peeing on some fucking girl in my fucking bed, the door busts open and here comes Driver going hey, come out to the car and help me get this stereo into the house.
Then it’s Christmas all of a sudden, partly because it is Christmas more or less and partly because we’re all excited about this awesome new stereo that Joe just got from Santa Driver. We’re feeling a little jolly, checking it out and ooh-ing and aah-ing. Once it’s all set up, we throw some Duran Duran on the turntable and shit! Only one speaker works. The wire’s hooked up and everything looks okay. So in a fit of aauuuggggh Joe just picks a speaker cabinet up and shakes it. There’s this thump thump sound inside and he goes, Aww man, the woofer’s loose. So we get a Phillips and open up the back of the speaker.
Dude I am not lying: two bricks of coke fall out. I was like Shit. Joe was also like Shit.
We hatched a second plan.
I was like Just pack this shit up bricks and all and take it back to the guy’s place. This could get us killed. I am smart about these things because I have half of a college education whereas Joe has none. Joe was all No, why don’t we take one of the bricks and send the other one back with the stereo? That way, he might think he just lost it or his roommate took it or something. I’m all Great let’s do that, because cocaine addiction trumps half a college education any day. We put the stereo back in the trunk and Driver takes off and we go back in the trailer to spend some more time doing blow and silently freaking out.
Speaking of which: the coke in those bricks. You better believe we broke open that other brick and did some of that coke. Let me just say this about that: ——!
Then the phone rang! Joe was all What? You did what? Then he hung up the phone. I was all What? He did what? Joe goes, He took the stereo to the police station. Just dropped it right the shit off. On the stoop. He said the dude was home—or so Driver thought—when he went to take the stereo back so he freaked out—silently—and just rolled up to the police station and dropped it off like the goddamn UPS guy. Joe said We gotta leave! Now! I said Okay! Where we gonna go? But by the time I said it, we—and by we I mean me and Joe and the other brick of coke—were in my Honda driving around freaking out—just freaking out and not doing much else. Just driving and freaking out.
Until I hatched a third plan.
I say, Hey, I have the key to Auntie Po-Po’s. She and my cousin are gone. We can go over there and hide out. And Joe’s all But when are they gonna be back and I was like I don’t think their flight gets in until nine tomorrow morning, so we’ve got practically all night to let this stuff shake out.
We go over to Auntie Po-Po’s. Place is all decked out for Christmas: tree, lights, mistletoe, even stockings on the mantel for me and my cousin hanging right side by side.
We continue to do that thing we do when we’re either high on coke at the trailer or high on coke on the air: talk a lot about nothing, like how In The Air Tonight is the greatest rock song of all time, no it’s not, Shock the Monkey is, I can fit a goddamn headline news update into the eleven second ramp on Shock the Monkey and still make the ID before the post and it’ll all be tighter than a baby’s ass, fuck you I made the AP top five and the network ID off the ass end of In The Air Tonight while matching the beat; fuck you back, it’s a long fade whereas I hit the top of the hour and the network feed off the cold-as-a-witch’s-tit ending of Them Shoes, Those Shoes, okay fuck you English teacher motherfucker, Those Shoes, dropped it in a slot the size of this fucking razor right here; all while we have St. Elmo’s Fire shooting off of our teeth because we have such capacity for love that it can only be expressed in scintillating arcs of electric bullshit.
Oh wait. I forgot about the Mezcal. We found Auntie Po-Po’s bottle of Mezcal with the worm in the bottom and started doing shots. It was the perfect pairing. Coke makes you too nervous? Do a shot. Mezcal makes you a little sleepy? Snort a rail. You can do that forever. Or until you pass out. Which is exactly what Joe did next, which I’m glad he did.
He kept pushing that thing about my cousin. She’s really got a great pair of tits, you know? She gonna be back here soon? Think she’d go out with me? I’ll fucking pay you to convince her to go out with me. I’ll give you a thousand bucks if I get laid. Seriously. Look, I have it right here. I just kept telling him to fuck off and have another shot, have another shot, fuck off, have another shot.
And then he just went claws up on the couch kinda like my dog used to do when it had a seizure.
It’s the craziest thoughts that are the most convincing, you know? Like the thought I was having while Joe was all passed out. I could just put a sofa bolster over his face and his doped-up lungs wouldn’t be able to fight off suffocation. Then I wouldn’t have to explain shit about anything to anybody. Not about how the dope got away or what happened with me and my cousin or anything. I probably would have done it if I could tell if my hands were really mine. I was pretty poorly drawn from what I could see. My boundaries were way the fuck off, like I forgot to color inside the lines.
I got up real close to his face like the proximity would help the truth pierce his thick skull and shitty beard, that whole disgusting edifice. I could feel my stain shining.
I said, When we first met and she saw my face, she smiled. She said I looked like I was made out of rubies. She traced every single line in my face and kissed me all over. The first time I was with her, the first time I was with anyone, she pressed herself to my sweat so long that her skin turned as red as mine.
Not a single word of that came out of my mouth, you understand. I had to think all of it at him. Otherwise those guys, the little guys in wetsuits who were under the house right then, they might hear me. A wetsuit is a sinister garment. It protects against detection. But I was already on to them. I could feel them. I knew they were down there in the crawl space with house jacks. They were jacking the house up slowly, almost imperceptibly. They were going to steal it. Those little fuckers were not going to get the best of me, though. Nobody steals my home from underneath me.
So I did what any sane person might do if somebody was trying to steal their house out from under them.
I called the police.
I did it the right way, though. So as not to arouse too much suspicion, I called the non-emergency number. I said to the cop on duty, really calm-like in my radio voice: Look, I know this sounds crazy, but there are men in wetsuits under my house right now and they have house jacks and they have hatched a plan to jack up my house and steal it.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then the guy said, Sir, have you been taking any drugs this evening?
And that just freaked my shit right out. It was like Satan pissed ice water into my veins. I was having a panic attack. I was having an aneurysm. I was having what people in twelve step programs call a moment of clarity.
I slammed the phone down. I went over and grabbed Joe and started shaking him. Joe! Joe! You gotta wake up! The cops are coming! But I could tell by the foam in his mouth he wasn’t ready to wake up just then.
I got in my car and drove with the radio off, like I could avoid detection by my colleagues in broadcasting that way. I drove until I was way out in the mountains. Just before I passed out I remembered that I left a brick on the dining room table and a Joe on the couch.
When I woke up the clock on the dash showed that it was two o’clock in the afternoon. I was pretty sure, no I was certain that I didn’t have a job any more. But I had to find a payphone anyway, even if I couldn’t dial with my hands shaking the way they were. I knew there was one outside the Tesoro station, so I rolled up there –
Hey, this is really fucked up, but it’s a pretty good trick. You know when you have the shakes really hard, so that you just can’t get a quarter into a payphone? Do this. Put it into your mouth and spit it into the slot. It works great because you never get the shakes in your tongue. It’s like your body knows that no matter how fucked up you are, you’re still gonna have to be able to eat. I’m right, yeah? Just don’t get your face froze to the metal on the phone.
Still I had to dial, but it was one of those push button phones so I just made a kind of “spare the gladiator” symbol against the face of the payphone and crushed the numbers one by one with my thumb.
Now when I think back, about the week after the stereo incident, when Driver enlisted in the Army, I remember how beautiful that kid really was. I got him all drunk and duct taped him to a chair and shaved his head the day before he went to boot camp. He looked so peaceful and innocent then, like he could be my very own baby boy. He wound up in Germany, driving tanks high on acid.
Then Auntie Po-Po picked up and I said hi it’s me.
She said hello dear. She said the house looks great. You really cleaned the place up nice. Thank you so much.
I would’ve said
what?
but the truth was already bleeding out of my nose by then and getting all over the receiver so I figured I ought to be really careful about what I took credit for. So I just said
hey sure thing.
Then she said
can I ask you about something?
I said
sure thing.
She said
did you make a crank call to the precinct from my house?
I said
I made some mistakes, Auntie Po-Po.
And I could hear just from the way her breathing changed that I’d have to talk really fast before the big cobalt curtain came down.
I said
wait wait can I tell you some things? Through the crack under the curtain I could hear her say
What kind of “things”?
By then I was crying and everything and my face was just flowing like the wounds of Christ and I said
I need to talk to you like family.
She said
You be careful with that. Remember that anything you say to me, you’re also saying to an officer of the law. I said
Yeah, I know. She said,
Now what is it that you want to tell me? You want to tell me you stole my bottle of Mezcal?
I said I want to tell you something about your daughter.
She said go on.
She said I’m still listening.