Parking Lots, Trailers and Motel Rooms

I can’t remember the first time I went to the restaurant but I walked by and around several times before eventually getting a job there like everyone else who wasn’t a stranger to downtown soon would. I remember walking around with Crystal one Saturday night and waiting to hear about something to do, somewhere to go, a party probably. She had a cell phone so I was tethered to her. We ended up in the back parking lot of the restaurant, dark and barely lit, it felt like it was only illuminated by the moon. There were street lights that ran along the nearby street, but this lot seemed to exist in a vacuum and once you stepped away from that street light and into this place darkness took over.

It’s never enough to tell just one story. It makes more sense if that story belongs to something bigger; a vast landscape, a family history, the cyclical nature of all that we know and try and control. Stories aren’t isolated unto themselves because life itself is not a series of isolated events.

We sat on a curb as we waited for a phone call to tell us where we should go. Anna pulled out her compact and checked her makeup, the street lights behind us giving her the necessary light. She asked me something. She offered me her compact and when I looked down I saw a few lines on the mirror. It was meth and she wanted to know if I wanted any. I took my time with my response, being careful and cinematic enough to look up into the night sky. And then I laughed to myself because of how funny it was to do a thing like that. To look to the heavens above as if the stars would spell out answer for me. As if the ghost of my grandmother, someone whose name I associated with a lifetime of mistakes, would form in the suddenly appeared clouds and guide me through or against this decision.

Nick was a late-night cook whose one trait I can remember above all others was how his jeans had an insane number of torn holes in them. He maintained a pretty positive demeanor at most times that was only undercut by a sense of deep sadness or regret that loomed beneath him at all times and could be seen if you really took your time to talk to him. It’s like those people who laugh at the end of nearly every sentence they speak, you know they’re doing it because it’s a subconscious mechanism they built over time to help pave over a showing other people a genuine emotional reaction. I thought Nick was going to work the graveyard forever. He was that rare utilitarian workhorse that was a combination of endless energy, cleaning ingenuity and strong, unwavering work ethic. One night he didn’t show up. He didn’t show up the next night and the night after that and the night after that. He never called and we had no idea if he was still alive or dead. His only friend he had ever really made during his time there was Doug, and he’d been fired months prior for trying to break into the restaurant. A couple of years later one of the waiters went to a nearby Jimmy Johns where he saw Nick working. The two of them had worked the graveyard shift during Nick’s time, and he asked him why he disappeared without a trace or even a word. Nick told him that he’d locked himself in a motel room for two weeks because he’d been smoking too much meth and thought people were coming to kill him, so he never left.

I sat there, still looking at the sky. And then I thought to myself a rather strange thought: what if I told myself, right now, that I was going to remember this moment? That right then and there, as I sat, I made the attempt to fold time on itself, and ensure one thing about the future.

There were quite a few others who fell to the drug. I witnessed most of them get addicted in the early 2000s. Casey and Leah invited me into the trailer they lived in and I remember an empty bottle of Mezcal with a snake at the bottom, its body permanently coiled up and mouth wide open, ready to strike. Leah helped introduce the drug into his life, and from there a few others we knew fell to it as well until it seemed like everyone was spending their time quarantined in some room hanging ten with a light bulb. Casey worked for a short time at the restaurant but never the same time with me. He and I shared one job washing dishes together when we were nineteen at another restaurant down the street where I learned the art of coke fishing which we would later do at the restaurant to pass the time.* Casey was involved in a horrible car accident with Leah that scarred up part of his face. When he was a couple of weeks out of the hospital he took a handful of painkillers one night and drank a lot. I’ve never met anyone with the tolerance he had, and at such a young age too. He could function quite normally on a ten strip of acid while drinking into the night. That night we walked to a friend’s dorm room and on the way there he kept walking into the middle of the street, collapsing and getting up or having me drag him out of the way of cars honking and trying to get by.

I declined. She shrugged, did a line and put the compact away. But when I declined I also told myself that I would make a bond with my future self with this decision. Seventeen year old me made a mental note for future me, the me now and the me that has looked back on this memory in the past: you will never forget this moment, but you will especially remember how you dictated that the you of the future, the older you, would be condemned to remember every single detail about this lightless night in the darkened lot.

*We’d take a small square of plastic wrap, place a little bit of flour in the middle and tie it shut. We’d then drop the baggie on the sidewalk in plain view of the kitchen and wait for people to walk by and pick it up. This process was sometimes repeated several times throughout one night.