253 West 27th Street
“Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.” — Pink Floyd, “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”
Enter extravagant mansion of tan-stucco-siding and faded Rubicon-red-roofing; balcony with all-real-moss; the Great Recession: 2008, summertime when the living is easy; night. The Boy, teenager, with tight ripped jeans, collared shirt with floral pattern two sizes too big, and back-combed black (actually brown but very very dark) hair best described as The Cure, lay on the second-floor balcony exposed to wind and Nature and the sound of ocean waves just yards away, all red; occasionally The Boy would flail his hand around on the hard concrete, reaching blindly for his pack of Marlboro Lights that an older high-schooler bought for him; and when he can’t find the cancerous combustibles, he yells “Robert!” real loud, deliriously hoping someone named Robert can find his cigarettes and perhaps light one up for him to smoke. The volume of the hopeless yelling was irrelevant as The Mom and The Step Dad were away on business. The balcony (a patio with all-real-moss) is off the side of The Boy’s spacious bedroom; a king-sized bed with floral-print-sheets pushed against the magnetic-east wall (known only because that wall is facing the sound of the waves from the Atlantic Ocean); a full bathroom to the left of the bed (if you were laying on the bed facing the bedroom’s entrance); the patio-balcony double-doors placed awkwardly to the right of the bed (one would get the impression the room was not designed for a bed in this spot, but also, where else would you place it? The room was oddly shaped, for this writer’s lack of better words, which I’m sure there are many, and also “mansions are meant to be shown off, not lived in,” Robert would say much later in life). The Boy was lying on the cement patio floor in the elements, close to Nature by proxy of being outside, but as far as he ever was from Nature as this was the age of electronic-bliss, and still is (the “bliss” part fell off and now we’re just complacent and a little more empty). The Boy was obsessed with drugs and wanted to do LSD, but couldn’t find any in the small island community in which he lived. The Boy looked up the next best thing online (using Firefox, even back then) and found the answer: cough syrup. Hours before being bound to the floor, The Boy’s friend, Robert, drove them both to Harris Teeter (a grocery store chain, more upscale than Winn-Dixie but less mainstream than Publix), and they were able to purchase a bottle of Zicam nasal spray (diligent teenage research revealed this to be the best for getting messed up within legal limits); and despite the product being “18 years or older,” the dead-eyed-cashier, of course, didn’t bat an eye when the boys purchased the mind-altering substance with paper cash given to them by The Boy’s loving-but-perpetually-absent mother.
Robert was smart for his age; he didn’t do cough syrup; but The Boy drank that entire bottle of Zicam nasal spray and was instantly feeling “it.” The Boy was Coral Tripping at the Gates of Now, and it sucked. The Boy’s vision turned red; he was unable to walk, having stumbled outside onto the patio and choosing to lay down because it was “just easier that way,” and the world would stop spinning (as much). He became very hot, and the cigarettes didn’t taste good anymore; he was sick and dying. Eventually, Robert helped The Boy off the patio, got him up, and got him to the floral bed. The Boy placed his head on the pillow-on-top-of-a-pillow (The Boy liked two pillows, always) and closed his eyes. Robert, now in command of The Boy’s computer, played music from an album titled “The Papercut Chronicles” by a hip-hop group named “Gym Class Heroes”; the music, although not something The Boy would normally listen to, stuck with him. “I took cutie for a ride in my death cab; she tipped me with a kiss, I dropped her off at the meth lab,” The Boy would sing along incoherently under his raspy Zicam breath. “Play it again,” The Boy would say before passing out for a brief moment. Robert, being the wiser of the two, looked it up: you shouldn’t fall asleep when overdosing on oxymetazoline hydrochloride, the main active ingredient in Zicam, which, ironically, produces some of the same effects you would take Zicam to get rid of. The Boy’s mom was out of town; the two teens were home alone, getting high, although Robert was wise and said multiple times that the idea of “drinking a whole Zicam” was “stupid” and “probably dangerous” (and was correct).
The music played louder than loud, and Robert tried hard to keep The Boy awake. But just then, Robert saw the light and heard something outside and looked out the window. “Your mom’s home,” he said, extremely concerned since The Boy was still lying in the bed, clearly sick and dying. Before preparations could be made, footsteps were heard coming up the stairs outside the bedroom door. Then, the doorknob twisting; surely this was slow-motion-terror for Robert, who put on his best “nothing’s wrong” game face, pretending to simply be “playing on the computer because your son fell asleep,” which was something that never happened because The Boy was always the one who stayed up, and Robert was – always – the early sleeper.
*the room in Rubicon
“What’s wrong, honey?” Mom said as she approached The Boy’s bed. Robert cut in, “he’s not feeling good,” said in what must have been the most fake-confident tone of voice ever. It helped that The Boy’s mom was a naive pushover who believed mostly-anything because The Boy was an angel, or she simply turned a blind eye to teenage antics, a mystery never solved because The Mom never once told anyone how she felt, ever. The Mom placed her hand on The Boy’s head; it felt like The Fires of Ibis. “You’re burning up!” she exclaimed before leaving the room and returning shortly after with a full pack of saltine crackers, water, and more cold medicine, NyQuil. The Boy drank the water, took a swig of NyQuil, and couldn’t keep the saltine crackers down; luckily, the mixture of NyQuil and Zicam didn’t cause a deadly-chain-reaction, and The Boy truly fell asleep about an hour later, only to awaken from druggie-slumber eight hours later with his first-ever hangover.
“You’re trying to be Syd Barret. You’re lost. You have no direction. Do you even have goals?” Robert scolded The Boy later that day after lunch at the local burger joint which was over ten miles away (it was a long, awkward, silent drive); scolding was something Robert nearly-never did, which means: it’s serious moonlight. And Robert was right. The Boy was a poor chameleon, changing himself to whatever he was obsessed with that week; that week it happened to be the tortured genius of Syd Barret, the brilliant Pink Floyd frontman lost to LSD; years before it was The Smiths, which led to good things like a lifelong obsession with writing, actually-good-music, and introspection but also not-so-good things like antisocial-behavior-reinforced and looking down on everyone while Wearing-Sunglasses-and-Smoking-Cigarettes because Johnny Marr, the guitarist of The Smiths, exuded this undeniable allure when standing on stage effortlessly playing some of the most off-the-wall and beautiful guitar riffs ever written with a cigarette somehow balancing perfectly on his bottom lip. The Boy pierced his ear with a hoop earring because Johnny Marr did it in 1982. The Boy looked cool and felt cool when he wasn’t thinking about how much of a fraud he actually was. He could emulate. He was like David Bowie but without the talent. Robert was right.
The Boy had the image but nothing to back it up, and that’s what leads to a job in sales.
(Originally published 10/3/2023)