“None taken.”
Fast Forward located his manhood and told Mouse he had lucrative connections in an untapped part of the state, and could certainly take them elsewhere. Mouse said if he was thinking we could all crash here, good luck finding a place to do it in this turdbone house. Which it was. The couch was broken in the middle and there were white kitchen trash bags, filled and lumpy, piled against one wall. A floor lamp stood bald and forlorn with no lampshade.
The giant guy was named Leon and not completely right in his head. He came out of the kitchen carrying a yellow cat and put it down on the glass table in front of the couch. “Here you go,” he said, and smiled at us. He was in a hoodie and boxers and had the physique you come to recognize: bad teeth, caved-in chest, skinniest legs imaginable. After Leon broke the ice, Mouse rolled her eyes and said “Whatever.” She threw the cat off the table and spread some powder for us all to get down there to snort lines. All except Couch Guy that was leaning over at an angle with his eyes closed and one hand over his face. I’d not seen Fast Forward do drugs before, only beer and weed. Emmy was hesitant, but Maggot got on it like a pro. Then I felt the peer pressure of Fast Forward glaring at me, and understood it was a politeness issue. Like Mrs. Peggot cooking you one of her hams: you better stay and eat or you’re not one of her people. So I went ahead and got coked out of my brain box. I was already kind of awake-dreaming due to no sleep since we left home, and now it took on a nightmare aspect, with prospects of future sleep slim to none. For the record, I do not and never will relish the feeling of the engine outrunning the chassis.
I don’t think much sleeping was done by anybody that night. Maggot and I were assigned to a room with no furniture in it other than a bicycle. We fetched our blankets and plastic bags of clothes to use as pillows, but the room smelled like gasoline and I kept seeing explosions in my mind’s eye. Explosion, explosion. Maggot told me to chill out, it was just the smell of ass combined with bike tire. He could fall asleep on any amount of uppers, one of his superpowers. That and snoring. I had no idea what Fast might be up to. Part of me thought I should go rescue Emmy, and the rest of me felt like, Who did I think I was? Emmy had the world by the balls.
There were comings and goings all hours, car lights in the driveway. Music pounding through the wall. Somebody had a Ja Rule fixation, to the extent of “Always on Time” becoming the permanent brain soundtrack of my bad nights, probably until I’m dead. Voices were raised. Maggot roused after a while and went out to investigate. Came back and said it was nothing, just some guys in a fight over somebody shorting somebody, and Couch Guy screaming. I asked why was he screaming, and Maggot said they were moving a lot of furniture out in the yard and his couch was in the running. I understood this to be the type of place you hear about, where people get knifed and so forth as a routine. The longer I went without sleeping, the more visions I had of gasoline explosions and people getting knifed. Minutes were like hours, and hours were like large bags of shit delivered to my skull box. I got kind of beside myself and ended up taking all the rest of what I’d brought with me to calm down, plus a 1-milligram Xanax that Dori slipped in as a treat. Getting ahead of schedule. I’d be fresh out by the time we got to the beach, so. Puking and cold sweats down the road, waiting to crap on my golden moment.
The worst part, I saw coming. Fast Forward was losing interest in the beach. If he ever had any. Most of the next morning he spent making his negotiations with Mouse, and the afternoon lying under his truck with a metal box and a screwdriver and two rolls of duct tape. Maggot and I sat on the front porch smoking weed and watching the man at his labors. Person after person walked by on the sidewalk, paying no mind to the Tony Lama boots sticking out from under the F-100, like that was regular everyday scenery. If this was back home, trust me, you’d have a crowd inside of ten minutes, interested kids plus the old guys with their free advice and power tools. But these city folk just turned a blind eye.
Later on we went out driving around to see the various things they had in Richmond, statues, state capitol building, etc. We ate at Popeyes. That’s where Fast Forward informed us we’d screwed around too much on the way up here, and now he had to get back. We were heading home in the morning. With the damn ocean no more than an hour away, two at the most, my dreams once again went down in flames. Son of a bitch. I was bitter and had nothing more to say to anybody, plus sick of smelling gasoline, so after we got back to the house I said I was sleeping in the cab of the truck. Mouse said I was crazy, she didn’t feel safe sleeping inside this dump, let alone on the street. Giving the impression of this being not her house, and her being some incredibly bossy visitor, which stood to reason. Her fingernails alone had seen more maintenance than any part of that property. But I did it, went out on the street. And slept.
The drive home was hideous. Fast Forward was all cocky over his score, the rest of us crashing from our various highs and expectations. The happy couple must have had a tiff, because Emmy wanted to sit by the window with me in the middle. Thankfully they made up at the first gas stop. But she was wrecked some way, I could tell. We all were. Maggot was borderline lunatic, either singing, unconscious, or blowing kisses at truck drivers from his throne back there. I was as mad as I’d been in my life. Mainly at myself, for believing in stupid dreams. And into withdrawals so bad, I had to embarrass myself by demanding unscheduled bathroom stops. If not for Dori waiting to rescue me, I was fit to drown myself in a truck-stop toilet.
Poor Dori, I’d left her for no good reason. We took forever getting back, with Fast Forward going the speed limit, thinking of his cargo I’m sure, plus you do not want to get pulled over with a boy-lunatic on open carry in the bed of your truck. There are laws. So I got dropped off late, in the dark. And there she stood under the porch light with her ice cream face and shiny hair, a big sweater buttoned up over her perfect body. We got inside and I was kissing her and then Jip got his teeth tangled up in the leg of my jeans to the extent of me punting him across the room, rolling and twisting.
“Sorry baby,” I said, and she said Jip meant well, and I let her think that. Clearly the little rat’s ass thought he’d gotten rid of me for good. Right away Dori asked to see pictures, shit. I’d never thought to take any, and was hard pressed to say where Angus’s camera ended up. Probably already pawned by one of Mouse’s dirtball boyfriends.