Michigan
Up at the top of Michigan, closer to Canada than the rest of the United States, just a twenty-minute drive south of the Mackinac Bridge, winter arrives in mid-October and sticks around until March if you’re lucky, April if you aren’t. Maybe it was the remoteness of that place, blocked off even further by the near constant snow, that made us so indifferent to the greater world—we never talked about politics, or celebrities, or anything that happened in the news. It took a long time for trends to reach us. There was a war going on in Iraq that we didn’t understand and were, vaguely, against. Marlena didn’t have a computer, and Ryder was never online; sometimes Greg and Tidbit and I chatted online, but my Internet connection was dial-up and unreliable. We listened to burned CDs that Marlena, who was a dictator about such things, compiled at my house with surgical attention. Even the radio seemed to channel some backward era. Each day had a narrow scope. We were focused, mostly, on getting high and drunk, and everything we did was organized in service of that immediate and urgent goal, especially if Marlena was sick or pissy. Our universe was limited to each other, hemmed in by the perimeters of Silver Lake and the towns around it, where Oxy had already laid down roots, farmed out by doctors treating a pain that most everyone seemed to have. The mecca was Shearling, less than an hour away, where there was a doctor who would give you anything if you listed the right symptoms and braved the line to see him, which filled the parking lot and spilled onto the street, people waiting in their cars for hours, ordering pizzas that were delivered to their windows, some of them even wearing sleep clothes. Marlena had seen it.
There were kids like us all over rural America, I’d find out later; we were basically statistics, Marlena especially, members of a numb army, ranks growing by the day. Alone in our bedrooms, falling asleep in class, meeting in parking lots and the middle of the woods. Marlena attended to her pills with a kind of loving ritualism—selecting her daily allotment from her stockpile, wherever it was hidden, and secreting them away in her pin. Once, someone slammed into her in the hallway at school and the pin popped open, two pills skittering to the floor. I watched her, normally pathologically cool, lose her shit, crawling around on all fours, near tears. One trend that did touch us. Now it strikes me as a profoundly American thing—an epidemic that started as an abuse of the cure, a disease we made ourselves. But what did I know about America? Back then I’d been infected with a chronic political apathy, a symptom, maybe, of being part of a family that was always barely scraping by, conditioned to be wary of the system.
For all of February and most of March, it was way too cold to spend time outside, and if we sat in Ryder’s car we had to blast the heat, which gobbled his gas, so on weekends we bounced between two places—Marlena’s, if her dad was out, and the warrens under St. Patrick’s. “No one is going to expect four teenagers to get stoned inside a church,” Ryder said, scratching the horn off the unicorn temporarily tattooed to his cheek. Marlena had given it to him the night before, after we finished off a box of my mom’s Franzia snuggled arm to arm under the jungle gym, holding open the plastic spigot for each other so that wine dribbled down our chins, soaking our coat collars. “It’s so dumb, it’s genius.”
He was relaxed, and that put us all at ease. Since a few weeks after I’d started going to school, he’d been jumpy. The night of his tattoo he’d made me walk with him around the entire neighborhood. “Shhh,” he said, grabbing my hand so that I’d stop. “Listen.” We stood like that in the middle of the road. I heard nothing but wind. Every time a gust surged by or a bird rose up out of a tree or something invisible shuffled through the ditch, Ryder squeezed my hand. The moisture between our palms was coming from me. When he started walking again, I pulled my hand free, unsure whether he’d meant to continue holding it. I buried both of my hands deep in my coat pockets, trying and failing to dry them against the nylon, and followed Ryder down to the end of the street and then back through a series of backyards until we reached mine.
“What’s that?” he asked, leaning so close I could feel his breath scuttle across my cheekbones, smell his baby-powder smell. He slowly lifted his arm, pointing to my kitchen window, where Mom’s shadow floated behind the curtain.
“Ryder, what on earth? It’s my mom.”
“Why is she at the window?”
“My house is tiny. If you’re in the kitchen, you’re in front of the window.”
Marlena said he was getting paranoid. “I don’t feel sorry for him at all,” she told me that night after the boys left and we were under my bedcovers, occasionally terrorizing each other by pressing an icy, outstretched toe against the other’s back. “I never wanted him to start dealing. He should be paranoid. He’s stupid about it. Before he dropped out, he used to brag all over school about selling joints dipped in crystal, all his dipshit tricks to try and make extra money.” She called his shit “a weird concoction, basically a scam” and told me that if it weren’t for the fact that he sold mostly to popped-collar tourists, he would have gotten the crap beaten out of him a million times over. “It’s dangerous,” she kept saying. “And dumb on so many levels.” I felt a little sorry for him after that—maybe he’d started dealing to impress her. I could understand.
I miss St. Patrick’s; I dream about it still, dreams where I wander through the tunnels, looking for something I can’t find, and dreams that seem to be set there for no reason. I’m grocery shopping, buying my regular stuff, except instead of shelves and bright lights the store is in the basement of St. Patrick’s, heads of lettuce lining the passageways. I loved how we sneaked in so brazenly, leaping up the church steps and walking into the foyer like we too were there for worship. I loved dabbing my fingertips in the holy water, cool and somehow viscous, like it really did harbor a living essence. I loved the little ricocheting jolt of fear that traveled through my veins when we ducked around corners, peering for nuns, before running straight for the gym and the janitor’s closet, our shoes squeaking against the waxed floor. I even came to love it underground, in that place we’d colonized, like explorers.
But Greg and Marlena complained. Why couldn’t we go to the Mapletree, where there was heat and a TV and beds and couches and access to a fully stocked bar?
“It’s so lame here,” said Greg. “It’s too dark to record anything, Tidbit is afraid that if she gets high in church Mary won’t save a place for her in heaven, and I can hear fucking mice. There are probably fucking mice on me right now.”