APPLE PIPES

In eighth grade there were five of us and I wonder if they think of me the same way that I think about them. If they add me to their stories the same way that I do. They’re characters in my mind. H, JS, B, and JZ. Like cartoons. I see them in such specific outfits, hairstyles. I remember the summer they all shaved their heads. I think B was the only one who opted out but I may be wrong. There’s a photo of us at the park. The summer that’s drilled into my mind. The first summer I smoked weed. Those daydreamy, floaty moments… light and fluffy and filled with laughter that made me fall off of logs. The stuff they sell now is dense and chemical and made to sedate. It’s fucked up. It’s too much. It’s not like it was when we’d buy our little baggy from the boy on the train tracks dressed in a track suit and driving a Buick, like a fucking movie. We’d buy, we’d drive up to the neighborhood above the trestle next to the house with the giant anarchist symbol painted on the side of it, and smoke weed out of an apple. My favorite sound was the sound of the apple exploding against the chain link fence when we’d toss it after finishing the bowl. The clash and clang of metal. The crush and spray of fruit and liquid. Laying on top of the 4Runner listening to whatever music we were obsessing over at the time. I remember hiding my stash in the box meant for tools, lending keys to friends during class to grab a dime or two. Stealing 20s from the cash register at the batting cage I worked at to buy a dub from the dude at the skatepark. Those days were short and long. I so easily could’ve turned into the trash I deserved to become but I slipped out at the last moment. H was sober for the longest out of all of us. He’d come to parties and call us idiots and make us feel dumb. As soon as my party phase was ending, his was beginning. N’s house is a night to remember. I don’t know if I drank anything, if I did I never got drunk but I remember someone had a bottle of 151 and H was excited about it and that confused me. He drank so much he ended up locked in the bathroom and wouldn’t let anyone in. Everyone thought that I’d be able to get to him but I couldn’t. He was mad at me for one reason or another and mad at everyone else for embarrassing him. N’s parents came home unexpectedly. His mom and my dad dated in high school so they knew who I was, they lectured the group and praised me for being the sober one there but I felt responsible for the person I called my best friend. Who was laying on the bathroom floor in a state I never thought I’d see him in. We grew apart many times in our life but this might’ve been the beginning of the end. I met H in an art class, which one I can’t remember but the teacher smelled like onions and I hated her. He wore one of those dumb jackets we all had from Zumiez that zipped all the way up the hood and had a million scribbly pictures drawn on it. Mostly white and black with some red in it. He wore it everyday, his long swoopy hair over his face, and he talked to no one. I wanted to be his friend because I knew he was probably weird in a good way. I forced him to talk to me and he tried to scare me off by making this raccoon sound by hissing and clicking his lips together. He had a purple iPod that I took home to add playlists to. I deleted Asking Alexandria and Hawthorne Heights from it and downloaded a bunch of other shitty emo music I decided was better. At some point H became the person everyone wanted to be friends with. We went from eating chicken nuggets alone at lunch sharing headphones, to me almost not being able to recognize him in the halls. H got a girlfriend who was a year younger than us. She was pretty, super naturally pretty, and she had a cool name. It was important for me to get to know her and for her to like me because I still wanted to be H’s friend and I didn’t want her to be jealous or afraid that something might happen between us. So I brought her along to a party once with my sort of hick older boyfriend and a bunch of his friends. We smoked a lot of weed out of a wooden pipe that made it taste like it was baked in an oven and burned. We were so stoned on the drive home that my depth perception was off and the lights from the construction on the road made the machinery look like giant robots. She was terrified but I couldn’t stop laughing to save my life. We made it home though. I remember her telling me about how her dad is allergic to tattoo ink and that it just bleeds out of him, and I thought that was gross and cool. I don't know what ever happened to her. We all got really into Seattle hip hop when we were around 16, old enough to drive, young and dumb enough to think it was cool that anyone over 21 wanted to hang out with us. We went to a lot of shows. Especially H and I. I’m embarrassed to say who we’d follow around, but we met a lot of fun new friends standing outside in line at El Corazon or the Vera Project. We'd get to Seattle so early that the artists would let us inside the venues because they felt bad for us. So we'd wander around and smoke weed in the bathroom and get scared and leave before anyone could figure out it was us. Up front at one of these shows a drunk girl is putting her arms up on my shoulders and leaning against my back to hold herself up because she can’t stand up straight. I’m getting annoyed and ask her to stop quite a few times and the security guard notices and tells her to lay off as well or she’d be kicked out. Half an hour goes by of trying to deal and I’ve had it. My back is aching from holding her weight and her hair is getting all over my face. I feel like a mattress. I fling her arms off my shoulders and yell in her face, "I’m done! Get the fuck off me." Facing away from her, her body still against my back, I put one foot up on the stage and press into her to shove her off me. Her little flip phone goes flying and breaks into a million pieces. Her friend who I hadn’t noticed before starts screaming at me to leave her alone. She calls me a cunt, which for some reason is what sets H off. He whips around and says "don’t you dare fucking call her that." And she takes a swing at him. He backs away and was like "I do not hit women, but she might." She looks at me and smacks me over the side of the head. Drunk girl grabs me and tries to hit me and then I see the security guard grab her by the pants and chuck her out the emergency exit, he then looks at her friend and was like “you better follow her…” As if that night couldn’t get any more dramatic, one of the performers brought a bottle of Goldschlager on stage (at an all ages venue btw) takes a huge swig and tosses it into the audience, splitting a girls eyebrow open.

FLESH

All my favorite stories about Jimmy are vile, but they're also soaked in innocence. I met Jimmy in eighth grade, we had english class together with Mrs. Mina and when she made him read aloud he'd read so fast that he'd start and end words right in the middle of saying them. I thought it was funny, but not in the way that you'd laugh at him, in the way that it added to his character and made him memorable. Before he had braces he had a mouth full of jumbled up teeth, his hair was was long past his shoulders and white blond, and we were just about the same height (a little under 5' tall at the time). He was the quintessential skater kid, cool shoes, tight pants, giant t-shirt, hat. Jimmy was effortlessly cool and carried himself in a way that made it impossible to make fun of him, he was witty, confident, and always had a come-back. We were instant friends. Sometimes I'd sneak a ride on the bus to his house and we'd get off at the wrong stop on purpose and pick up an ice cream sandwich and chocolate milk at Jay's Market for the rest of the walk home. His dog would greet us at the door, his mom was usually working so we'd make ourselves some Top Ramen and throw on a movie, for a while we kept putting on Benjamin Button and without fail fall asleep immediately after gulping down our noodles. I don't think we ever finished the movie. Jimmy was a different person when there wasn't so many people around, I felt lucky to get to know him in that way even in little snippets. I can't remember what year this happened but Jimmy broke his arm. And when I say he broke his arm, I mean he slammed the pavement falling off his skateboard so hard that the bone broke through his skin. He had to have surgery and the orange shit that they spray on you to disinfect everything gave him a rash under his cast that he couldn't itch. So he came to school and complained about it for weeks. That cast reeked and it wasn't until I went with him and his mom to the doctor to get it cut off that we figured out why. The rash had blistered and when all the skin fell off it had nowhere to go and it just sat wet and sweaty under the bandages until months later when they finally removed the thing. Skin peeled and fell to the ground and he itched like crazy until the doctor begged him to stop because he still had to take the pins out. The doctor looked at me and asked if I wanted to do the honors. I hesitantly said sure with his mom's approval and when I touched them I could feel the pin knocking against the bone and I pulled it out like a toothpick in the middle of a sandwich. The summer after ninth grade, I went to Chelan with my family and their friends. One of them was the coach of the highschool basketball team and a big group of those boys came with. Jimmy's dad had a house near the lake and he was spending the summer with him and I was excited to have an escape from the jocks for while. Although it was kind of fun smoking them in poker every night. Jimmy and his friend Cam came and met me at the cabin I was staying in and we walked for what felt like forever back to his dads house. We fished for popsicles in his ant infested freezer only to find that they had mostly melted and the carpet had fleas so we left the house with bites all over our legs. We walked, we itched, we jumped in the lake, we walked, we made it to the skatepark, we itched, we jumped back in the lake. It felt like the perfect summer. We'd probably never spent so much time together as we did that week. Long days hauling our asses back and forth across the lake, scavenging for food and something to do. I lent Jimmy my back pack sometime before school ended. I think his broke and I had an extra, but while we were in Chelan he decided to give it back to me. As I was clearing it out at the skate park I found a pair of my socks that he had borrowed, completely crusted to the bottom, flat as a couple of pancakes. He swears they were like that because he wore them for a week and forgot about them. Sure. I recently ran into Jimmy at a bar in Seattle. He hardly recognized me. I grabbed him by the shoulder and had to tell him who I was. A week or so later I asked him what his favorite memory from our childhood was and he mentioned something about Chelan that I had completely forgotten about. One night the basketball team and I snuck out and met up with Jimmy at the basketball courts, we were determined to play. We broke into the box to turn the lights on and stayed out all night. It was silly and simple and precious. I liked that this was the part of that trip that he chose to remember. The summer after that, he went on a trip to Hawaii to scuba dive. He was VERY into scuba diving at the time. When he came back he called me and asked me to come over. He had something for me and also needed help with something. I hopped in my '92 4runner and sped over to his house excited for my gift, but before he would give it to me he made me help him peel the giant dried up blisters off of his back. They came off in enormous chunks revealing absolutely burnt to a crisp skin underneath. My gift was a stone turtle that I super glued to my dashboard. Our group of friends consisted of mostly boys and a couple of their girfriends. The boys boxed when they had beef. They’d bitch and moan about one friend or another until everyone got sick of it and would put them head to head with the gloves on and make them fight it out like “men.” I was pissed at Jimmy during one of these brawls and tried to get him to box me but he wouldn’t and everyone refused to let it happen. So I hucked him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes onto his bed and he flew between the wall and the mattress, screaming that I ripped his mole off his back. No one ever found it. I imagined a shriveled piece of meat turning up over time but I'm sure it never did. When I asked Jimmy about his favorite memory he told me that he was glad that I reached out, he wanted to message me but thought that I hated him for some reason. I don't know why I would and maybe I did at some point but it's been too long to recall. I do remember when we stopped talking, a year after highschool I think, I slammed on my brakes while I was driving around Lake Stevens and that stone turtle went flying, hit me directly in the chest and I chucked it out the window. I went back for it later and the head was cracked off and nowhere to be found so I tossed the rest of the body in a ditch and said goodbye.