Alex

          I hate that girl.  I should hate that girl.  I don’t even remember her name.  That’s how much I should hate her.

          I’m not depressed often, so I guess I’ve worked up a well-deserved sulk.  Of course it’s not love.  Football whore.  That doesn’t mean my stomach can’t do flips and lurches and feel like it wants to get out of me.  It’s not the rejection that hurts.  It’s not the fact that I wasted thirty cents of gas on her every goddamn month, just so I could see that dumb glassy face, Twiggy-pretty, go-go-booted, miniskirt hiked up to perfection.  It’s the fact that over this sensitive darling of a boy, she picked that single-layered, vacantly-staring thing, a stereotype with legs and a crewcut.  Not picked, chose.  It’s deeper than that.  It’s personal.  Fateful.

          Buried somewhere under the layers of shame and mortification is the good sense I know I have, sometimes, and it’s probably telling me right now that Alex standing there with his Cheshire Cat grin holding a bottle of Gilbey’s gin is not good for me.  Alex has never been good for me, but he does own a driver’s license that lets him buy alcohol.  He’s also a good listener.  When he’s not hammered out of his skull. 

          I’m not like Alex.  I’m a nice boy, and that’s my problem.  He’s the kind of kid that drives around on a motorcycle and works for next-to-free at Wendy’s, while straighter-cut dudes like myself putter around in chipped Pontiacs running ’67 engines and have jobs at pharmacies.  That said, when I have problems, I go to Alex, and he makes my troubles disappear with the wave of a bottle.

          He shrugs on his greasy jacket and takes over the Pontiac.  It’s not hard to find bubbling brooks in Oak Ridge; he picks a scenic wooded spot to pull over and the guzzling begins.  In five minutes, everything is wonderfully awful.  I feel epic realizations rolling over me and disappearing back into the sea of my mind, and I don’t know whether they are earth-shattering or stupendously lame.

          All of life’s tragedies flash by, a huge kaleidoscopic mess.  I feel like it’s hurting me deeply, but very soon it hurts not-so-deeply, in a vomiting kind of way.  The transition between euphoria and misery is instantaneous.  All the problems and worries, blissfully negated, hurtle back tenfold, and my epiphanies suddenly have a lot to do with all the horrible things gin can do to a malnourished, love-wasted high school boy.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt this turbulently like shit in my life.

          My door groans open and I feel my center of gravity shifting to accommodate my new position – lurched across the threshold, my legs trapped under the seat, my torso strewn across the gravel.  Alex seems to have been affected by my plight.  We are both limply hanging out of our doors, heaving onto the grass.

          The vomit is no longer a pool.  It’s a trail.  Preoccupied as I am with being wretched, I do realize what this means.  The ground below me has begun to move. 

          Somehow, in mid-flail as my body slid out of my seat, I have knocked the steering column out of place.  Slowly, inevitably, the car rolls, dragging with it its loyal passengers, two moaning half-dead teenage idiots, our leadweight arms leaving ruts in the dirt as we are dragged towards the ever-more-deafening roar of the brook.  My mind seems to be moving at a glacial pace, and raising my arms proves to be nothing short of impossible.

          A time period that I can’t quantify passes.  The ground is cold and nice, much nicer than the sticky leather of however long ago.  Some yards away, down that beautiful scenic incline, the little Pontiac is like a duck dunking for food on the bank of a river, rear end suspended in the air, back wheels rotating futilely.  I don’t know why I’m not still in it, but all I can think is that I gathered my thoughts long enough to roll out.  Maybe Alex was as lucky, maybe he wasn’t.  Little Miss Pin-Up and her go-go boots are mere pinpricks on the horizon of my misfortunes.

          Screw it all, say I in my sloshed brilliance, and black out.  Who knows what’ll happen when I wake up?