Cluster Headache
My hometown, you know, it’s like a broken record sometimes, skipping on “the hills are alive” with the sound of chainsaws and bulldozers, or “summertime” and the living is a shit show, with the chorus screeching, “hush little baby, don’t you cry,” or I’ll smack you over the head — give you a big bad cluster headache.
Back in high school, I wasn’t listening, all I could think was how I was gonna get laid — skinny dude that I was, wasn’t exactly easy to pull off. I’ve got other things on my mind now, but if I blurt them out, I get the glazed look and “shit happens, man,” and “whoa, chill,” cuz you know, wasn’t like a murder mystery or true crime why it was the young people in my hometown who died.
There was this freckled little dude down the block, dead at 5 or 6. Brain tumor, they said. Didn’t know the family, their house was, like, too fancy for the neighborhood.
Then my buddy’s sister, 9 years old, playing on the street, got killed by a hit and run, like a cat. “Mom was never the same after that,” my bud told me with a smirk when he was all grown up and a cokehead and embezzling from his job.
Brain tumor, my girlfriend, 15. Passed out in the middle of the intersection on her bike — awesome long legs kept her from toppling over. The place was a graveyard after dark, just the two of us on our bikes. I swung back, called out to her, but she was like, comatose, staring into oblivion. Then she came to and pedaled home like nothing happened. I went in with her to tell them, but before I could open my mouth, she started howling her head off about how her head was killing her. I let her folks handle it and tiptoed out.
I was away over the summer when they buried her. Didn’t go to see them when I got back, you know, to pay my respects — they were even more fucked than my folks. They’d had her back in school for a bit at the end of the year, wearing a tatty fake-looking wig. We didn’t talk. I was making progress with my new girlfriend, didn’t want to shake nothing loose.
Another brain tumor, 16, been absent only a month. He was a mousey kind. Can you say that about a dude? Nerdy, then? Point is — no one gossiped, nobody asked where he was at, and suddenly the whole class is attending his funeral.
Found inside a culvert beneath some out-of-the-way road, 17. Had got her hands on a gun somehow — something to do in the dog days of summer. Rumors had it that it was a broken heart but maybe she took after her old man who’d been depressed until he blew his brains out. According to the ME, she changed her mind after (God knows how they can tell that), which means she had time to think, which means she didn’t do a bang-up job with that firearm.
I told the cops wasn’t me that gave her the gun. Didn’t break her heart either. She was hot all right, but way too uptight for me. We hung out a few times in her living room on the frumpy couch, pretending to study, with her fat hippie mom in a tent dress flipping the doorway beads going in and out. I recall her favorably, though, cuz she kept her smokes in a jar on the coffee table next to the glass ashtray: help yourself. Her only child didn’t live long enough to coat her lungs in tar, but I keep on puffing. I’ll keep on puffing until the day I die — meditation on cancer and my fucked up folks.
After high school there was this girl, 19 year old, that tripped and fell down a narrow mountain trail — hiking. Kinda shit folks do on summer vacation, unbelievable. Could just see it — rolling stones and roly-poly tumbling down the escarpment in a swirl of dust. She’d still be around if she just hit the keyboard, like me. They announced it in the auditorium at the start of sophomore year, like what’s-her-name won’t ever have to stress over her weight or put up with mind-numbing lectures and assignments and exams, scrambling to get the credits to move on. What the fuck was I thinking going to college.
Younger son of my next door neighbors, twenty-something, army-something, can’t remember much about him except he was the preferred sib in that family — tall, hunk-handsome, you know — big loss for the proud parents. Their older son — a navy seal, actually, kinda dude that didn’t suffer fools — snapped at his folks in front of me when I was over to offer my condolences, told ’em to quit being proud, that friendly fire wasn’t the same as killed in action. All I could think was how we’d never know if his brother was gonna grow brain tumors down the road from the burn pits or depleted uranium, or whatever the army dudes are made to breathe.
Brain tumor, age 20, and brain tumor, age 23. Two more classmates that didn’t know not to waste their short lives sitting in stupid classrooms. One lived at the end of my street, the other a few blocks away, near Main Street. Fucking cancer cluster, God knows what all they been spewing around here. Wasn’t enough being downwind from foul-smelling smokestacks, some company with headquarters the other side of the continent decided to fuck up the groundwater with their drilling operations, and that’s besides the crop dusters buzzing overhead all summer long, drenching the fields that ringed the town with some kinda poison. Made me crash through the clinic’s waiting room, past the cute girl at reception, “Doctor, doctor,” slamming his office door, “I’ve got an awful headache, gimmie an MRI or a CT scan. Oxycotton, too, if you don’t mind.”
Okay, that bit about the doctor, that never happened. Just that any time I get a headache I freak out. And sure, I know some of the stories I told ya were accidents, and some didn’t happen in town, but you gotta consider the bigger picture, you know, when things look like what you’d call too strange for fiction. Could also be — hell, why not? — conspiracy theory. Or it’s aliens, that’s also an option. Not much I can do about them except wait for the cluster fuck to come down like a boulder from outer space and collide with my head. End of the world kinda event, though you won’t know it if you’re dead, so I try not to be. Know what I mean?
June 2015.
