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I have never written about my time in Missouri in prose, only have dealt with it through metaphor and allusion in the poems. So much happened , Lenin said “there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen” and there is nothing more true.
I'm not going to talk about Lenny the country boy who went barefoot to night court or how we got him evicted from his apartment. I'm not going to talk about any conspiracies of the Gasconade or the journalist with the gun at the river house. I'm not going to talk about the drug fueled hippie parties out in the woods or about the dead dogs. I won't speak on the burglary at Town Hall or the war vet who held my friends hostage. I'm not going to bring up Taco Tuesday and the night whatsername tried to go out with a bang. I'm not even going to talk about Crazy Mark or the drunken Tennessee snake wrangler who taught me to be an artist.
I'm just going to talk about the end and it started when Milo went back to the desert.
One minute we’re artists at an arts residency in the middle of rural Missouri, bebopping down Alvarado Avenue, I ran an open mic at the pool hall in the middle of town where you could smoke cigarettes and get pitchers of cheap draft beer for six bucks, it was the first time the residency had a bunch of young artists and we pushed the damned thing to its zenith. A rubber band only can be brought so far before it eventually snaps. A dream can only be carried so far on the backs of the hopeful before it eventually turns sinister. And I guess after that summer in Belle, Missouri we all learned to dance under a sinister moon.
After everything that happened( I won’t go into it in this post but if you get me drunk enough and the stars align in a certain way I’m sure I’ll tell you a tale or two). But we were all pilgrims who left our metropolitan nests to find something in God’s Country and you could argue that we all found something and left something behind too. I know I left a piece of my soul out there- a fragment of the innocent me still haunts the hollers off of Highway D and chain smokes Sonoma Red’s under the Missouri sun. Can you remember the way the wind smelled coming off of the Gasconade river? We were light bulbs in a dark room and we burned out. Baby we burned out so bright that I’m sure our shadows have been burned into the chipped asphalt in front of that fucked up house. A monument to how time can get away from us all.
And I guess it all started with the neighbor. Danny was a tweaker. Danny was THE TWEAKER. One moment he was just a spectacle and we would watch him hammering away in the backyard all night, all skin and bones throwing a sledge hammer into the wet grassed yard and we thought he was building something but really he was just chasing away the mole people. When I asked him about it he asked me if I saw any mole people which of course I didn’t.
“Exactly. You should be thanking me”
Then I’m in his dimly lit dining room and I’m holding a straw to my lips and he has a flame to the bottom of the tinfoil that he folded tight into a boat and the crystal bubbles under the heat and dances along the foil leaving only amber traces. The smoke billows up through the straw like some sort of serpent and finds its home in the chasm where my soul once lived. And then we’re rocking and rolling and then the drug hits me like a freight train and it echoes through the foundries of my brain like one too and what people miss when they talk about amphetamines is it isn’t just the insane rush that grabs you. It’s the tranquility of the come up that is jarring. It’s the peace when the chemical orders every chaotic occurrence in your brain into a single file line. With one hit held into the fabric of my wheezing lungs, I had found my daily bread, found god’s manna and I guess there was no going back then.
I sniffed mine. It burned like you couldn’t imagine something burning, your eyes would water down your cheek but by the time it hit your sinuses you were already in heaven baby. And do you remember how quick it took hold of us? I had already had an adderall habit by then acquired from the long hours I worked at my jobs. You know adderall, the prescription drug they give to children with ADHD- it’s just speed. If you tell people you do adderall they think you’re a college student or an entrepreneur but if you tell them you have ice in your veins you’re just a fucking tweaker. It’s how it goes.
Danny had been a brick layer when he wasn’t incarcerated for manufacture, he had built his house by hand smoking gak off of aluminum foil (he said it just hit better) and haunting the night like a specter desperate for a kiss from the sun. He had built trap doors and all kinds of wild passages into his house. His favorite trick was to invite you inside when you were looking for a bag and he would excuse himself to the bathroom and you’d hear him in there singing Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard and moving around and you’d wait. Then it would be a half hour and you’d be like what the fuck? bang on the door and then it would hit you that this dude was old and an addict you better check on him. So you’d rush into the bathroom and it would be empty. The sonofabitch built a staircase to the basement beneath the bathtub like El Chapo. It was always chaos with him. The television playing black and white old movies on full blast, the stereo screaming heavy metal, his motorcycle revving and the oxygen tank he was supposed to be using beeping and desperate for a charge.
Tweakers love hiding their shit and it’s not necessarily from anyone in particular but from themselves. He would hide his gak in boxes of macaroni and cheese burned into the bottom of the plastic bag. It was actually impressive you really wouldn’t even believe there was anything there. Danny swore on his kids that he learned it from an old James Bond movie but I never believed him.
But we were on it then. The residency program was shaking at its foundation too but we just saw it as another pillar of society that we once believed in but had lost faith in. We were just two hedons on the edge of suburbia and now we were in an awkward autumn in God’s Country where we were a thousand miles from home and we didn’t feel like anything mattered. Lenny’s apartment had turned into a trap house and the parties at our own studio which was a two bedroom house had grown to a fever pitch. Any night of the week you’d find us involved in some form of chaos corrupting the youth with tales of adventure and debauchery. Windows would break at the house from fighting or fucking or whatever else dumb shit doomers do when the night goes on too long and I would just throw an American flag over the broken panes. Because fuck it, it’s Missouri. We’re patriotic out here baby.
But at night it was just us again, Seraphina and I and we were so naked and pretty, we were so alive in the moments before dawn. Dancing to Motion City Soundtrack and Rainbow Kitten Surprise, writing poems into the early hours and talking so honestly and free of things that we would never say beneath the sun. We were like animals on the bed or the couch or the floor. Or wherever I could pull your body into mine and hold you and taste your haunted mornings and trace my hands along your pale white goosebumped skin. Our bodies danced to the rhythm of our pounding hearts; the streetlight that flooded the windows showed magnificence in our dilated pupils as wide as flying saucers.
Baby we were staying up and we had nowhere to go but oblivion but we had enough cigarettes to fill the ashtrays and enough ice to build an igloo and we were tiptoeing the guardrails of damnation. And around that time is when we had that scare. What started as purely a weekend dance with the devil had invaded the rest of our week. We stopped sleeping, we stopped eating, we stopped having parties, we stopped cleaning the house, we stopped doing anything but that. On the couch at 3am, you asked how long you had been gone for? You hadn’t been gone at all but you had been in some dissociation that you had packed your bags and went to heaven. I’m not sure what scared me more or the fact that I had gone to work everyday at the supermarket for the last five days and couldn’t recall it. And that’s when your anemia got real bad and you started fainting. Like the time you came to visit me at my job and passed out and I was so angry not knowing what the fuck you were on but it was the result of our actions. It was the result of my influence. I have no regrets in this life except for this.
But we vowed to pull the emergency brake and get better and I remember bringing you to the diner in town and you ordered a chicken sandwich and I just got a burger and our teeth felt like glass biting into our food but I watched the rose plume of life return to your cheeks. Danny had to go to the hospital because he caught a bad case of cancer again from smoking meth off of aluminum foil, it was his fourth time. He would say it’s the cause but it’s also the cure. And we really tried to leave it behind us. We started trying to live again. Smoking weed with our friends and you’d cook dinner for the remnant of the artists and all our yee yee country friends. But the come down was a plague all on its own. When you’re moving at 100mph for a while and you hit the brake you’re bound to slide. But we were trying. The pet chicken Orla we had for some fucking reason- we gave it away to Crazy Mark and we were trying to make sense of it all then.
When Danny left the hospital you knew he wanted to party. And I had told him that I wasn’t going to be buying gak anymore but he still wanted to get down especially with company. He was insistent. We had made a fortress of blankets and couch cushions that night and were ignoring the knocking on the door just cocooned with each other smoking blunts and watching I Love You Phillip Morris when we heard a loud bang and the revving of an engine. First thought was that someone had hit your car but looking through the towel that covered the window above the door it was fucking Danny. In his pickup truck with his two tires on the cement of the front porch steps the wooden swing busting into the linoleum of the siding blasting Miley Cyrus Party In The USA and hanging out of the driver’s side door “Let’s party!” He bellowed over the truck’s roaring radio.
“Life is a meme” I said. “Me trying to stay sober vs my raging meth addiction”
Eventually he went away and we waited until his truck was off of our porch and his door was shut to slip out into the night. We were at Lenny’s drinking Milwaukee’s Best and talking shit with the other country kids and that was the night they had that one boy in the kitchen duct taped to the chair for snitching on their weed operation to the Marshall. The slaps brought you into the kitchen and you’re all fire and punk vibes but you know you’re a gentle soul and this turned your stomach. We ended up leaving and headed back to our studio when we passed by Danny’s and heard the screams coming from his house; his screen door wide open and truck door wide open too. I thought he was being robbed or something so I ran into his house. Once I made it past the beeping of the oxygen tank and the screeching of the radio and the television I saw him.
He looked like a mutant from a video game or something. His neck was swollen to three times its size and you could see the veins bulging through it. The day after he returned from the hospital. The day after he had a growth cut out of his lungs. When he was instructed not to smoke anything and they had meant cigarettes but I’m sure by this time they had it figured out. Something popped in his lung and pulmonary fluid was in his throat. Before I called 911 he had me clear out his stache. I checked all the macaroni and cheese boxes and forced his oxygen mask onto his face while I called the paramedics and he hollered that his balls were the size of grapefruit.
I watched this man take the mask off and rip another hit off of the aluminum foil it sizzled and he exhaled a cloud of anguish. I looked at him with just shocked resignation. He shrugged and prepared another while he took a pull of the oxygen. “I hate it when I love it and I love it when I hate it kid. The gak is yours. Use it. Sell it. Just don’t sniff it, it’s not good for you when ya do it like that”
I don’t know what those witches on Tiktok see in the crystals they buy at those magic shops but these shards had power. And it was that very night that we figured we would have one last hoorah. Take the weekend to stay up and mess around and surf the fiery waves of hell for just one last chance but that’s not what happened. It never happens like that. We were back at it again, each day slipping into one another. The parties grew more intense and our own use grew worse. What had once given us the will to do things now took it away and left us destitute and broken on the couch. The house fell to shambles and the director came banging on the door. Our exit had been moved up and the party was over but it was too late by then. It was like the sins of our father painted yellow brick roads to addiction and how could something that brought us such joy and freedom bring us here? The windows were broken, the house was trashed and we were so skinny then. We were no longer naked and pretty but haunted and hollow.
We had a month to get the place back into order but that one night the world came crashing down like an angry fist from God and suddenly we were in a D.A.R.E. commercial. Your anemia was back and you passed out shirtless strewn out across the bed atop all of your clothes and the world rocked and shook. I knew if we stayed any longer there that it would be the end of us. I ripped a rotten broken molar out of my mouth with pliers and it hit the sink in a pool of blood. I looked into the mirror and I didn’t see an artist or a youth or a man of any virtue but a slave to a substance. That sobering moment shook the foundation of my soul and I’m not sure if I’ve ever recovered. Without thinking I began to pack your car and it was midnight. I filled the damned thing to the brink with your clothes and shoes and everything else you had. The place be damned we had to go.
Outside I had a small fire and I was burning papers and paraphernalia and plotting this whole thing tracing the orange glow of the flames with my shallow eyes. Danny was back by then and he joined me and was spun out to the heavens. He was in his whitey tighties and pouring gasoline into the fire which was now a bonfire linoleum dripping from our haunted house. I woke you up and took you by your hands and told you we were leaving and we were leaving now. There were no goodbyes, there was no time to wait, we had to get on the road. And you trusted me.
I left everything I owned there except what fit into my backpack and we took the cat and piled into the car with Danny still dancing around the fire behind us screaming into the night sky “GAK! GAK! GAK!” The fire painted him crimson under the hollowed glow of the winter Missouri moon. We pulled away into the deep night of the country and he grew smaller and smaller in your rearview mirror.
When we passed the big church in Bland you turned to me and said “it’s so romantic getting caught up in it all isn’t it?”
We left the residency as the pandemic had just started hitting the country so we returned to a world we didn’t even recognize. No sad poem can ever capture the feeling of loss, defeat, and heartbreak that we held in our hearts. No song can ever make us forget all of the blood we left on those floorboards. It all happens so fast. We were light bulbs in a darkroom and we burned out.
And so it is. And so it will be.
You hit nail right on the head with this one. I still live in Belle and the fire you spoke of is still burning faster and brighter than ever before and there are still people dancing around it maybe a little faster than the fire is burning and I think that there are a few new people there as well. You may never actually see them but then again you don't have to see them to know they were there!