Layover on the Moon

Years ago, I discovered that unlike God a man actually can build a world in seven days, and he can destroy it in a heartbeat. This was back when I was just getting hooked on dope and young enough to know everything.

I spent a week hiding out in my old cargo van in a Walmart parking lot, sharing a needle with the only girl I ever thought I could love. We slept on a makeshift mattress of grimy utility blankets, survived on McDonald’s and Marlboro Reds, and stayed hydrated with a case of rum bought on a stranger’s credit card. There were laughter and tears, lots of sweat and panic, too. Sometimes it all hit at once. We held onto one another whenever the fear came shaking us. But mostly we were dope sick or zonked out. We left the van for the outside world only to puke in the parking lot, to use the Walmart bathroom, or to buy more heart attack food across the street. We opened our chests and wrung out our little hearts like sponges that week. We lost a lot of blood and made a lot of promises we would never keep. We thought we’d found paradise in a parking lot.

Somehow, I’d convinced Kyle to run away with me, to leave behind our crumby little town. We were eighteen. We’d known each other our whole lives, mostly as classmates. We started shooting dope together before we started kissing each other. I think we both found dope to be a higher form of romance and intimacy than sex. We left home without a plan, just drugs and a tank of gas and all those big American roads crisscrossing in every direction. We got onto a highway headed west, but we only made it one county over before we started fiending and scratching ourselves red like a pair of strays.

I pulled into the Walmart lot thinking we’d do a shot, get ourselves cured for a couple hours, and get back on the road. We climbed in the back of the van, heated up a spoon, and spent the next week building our world. It was a world without borders, ruled by dope and love. I would’ve stayed in that parking lot forever if infinity was real. But world’s run out of resources, and once our money and dope were gone, so was the possibility of love.

We got in a bad fight. I was blaming Kyle for doing too much of our junk, for crying too much, for not having green eyes, for whatever I could think of, and she was blaming me for being broke, for living in my van, for being too chicken to rob the gas station where her old man worked. It was one of those circular fights with no end in sight. Our brains were fried circuitry. We were both so strung out we could hardly cast a sentence. When you shoot up like we used to, when you share needles and blood with so many strangers, eventually you forget who you are.

I don’t know what came over me, but I finally got so heated I grabbed Kyle by the throat and hit her in the mouth. I hit her just like I promised I never would. One of the reasons we were leaving town was to get away from Kyles dad and her granddad, all those men who came home with scars from foreign invasions, with hands permanently knotted into fists, raging rivers of blood coursing through their veins. We were escaping those men who beat on her and stared at her and whistled and grabbed at her outside the bar. I remember I tried to stand up to Kyle’s dad one night, but he pummeled me, mashed my nose into a flat bed of wet concrete, and I hadn’t been able to breathe the same since.

When I hit Kyle and she fell backward I felt something fall and die inside me. She was on her back clawing at the air and bicycle kicking with her thick combat boots, her nose oozing blood, screaming, “Don’t you fucking ever… Don’t you fucking ever…You coward!”

She grabbed her leather purse which was studded with these little silver spikes and started swatting me with it. I opened the back of the van and jumped out. Kyle jumped out too. She took off across the parking lot, but she didn’t run after me. She ran toward the highway screaming for help. A truck pulled over, and I wasn’t about to wait around for someone to call the cops, so I got back in the van, back on the highway, unsure which way I was going. I pulled over and looked at the atlas. All the tangled-up roads looked like a plate of rotten spaghetti. I was junk sick, and I vomited all over the map. There was no escaping any of it, I thought, wiping the bile from my chin.

I turned around and drove back home, thankful I at least had my van, my little mobile home. I thought that van was all I would ever need. I loved everything about the van. I loved that I’d actually paid for it with my own money. Mostly I loved it because it should’ve been dead by then, but it wasn’t. It just kept on driving me, collecting miles and rust. Just like me, it was ugly and indestructible.

Back on the gray streets of my hometown, I parked at Kelly’s Bar thinking I’d spend the night drinking one of everything on credit. Tommy was bartending after all. He was a world-class failure by his own admission, but he was all heart when he was pouring drinks, filling glasses right up to the rim, and always including a free shot.

It was late. A weeknight. Most all the hardcore drunks had blacked out, passed out, and gone home by then. There was one old-timer shaking in the corner of the bar, and as I walked in he lifted a last sip of whiskey to his mouth. Most of it ended up running down his chin. He got off his stool, eyes open but blinded by liquor, and he stumbled out.

Hydrid Moments by The Misfits was playing. One of Kyle’s favorite songs. I remember she cried the first time she played it for me, and I still get choked up whenever I hear Danzig howling those fist lines:

If you’re gonna scream scream with me / Moments like this never last

Then the song ended, and another one didn’t come on. I felt like I’d walked into a dream. The bar felt quieter than ever. It was just me and Tommy alone in there. We had been the only two in the bar on other nights(?), but somehow the emptiness was different that night, like something I could feel or taste. Something that might wrap a forearm around my neck and end me. The emptiness had a presence. The emptiness had us surrounded. Each neon beer advert hanging from the faux wood paneling, each froth stained pint glass, each red candle, each corner shadow, each bar stool, each ashtray, and each stubbed out cigarette felt utterly alone. I felt like I was in a vacuum being sucked into some vast dark center of nothingness.

I told Tommy he’d make a little more money that night if he closed early. He saw the way my hands were shaking, and he poured me a shot and then told me we should stop by his house first.

Hanging with Tommy was like hanging with a ghost because Tommy’s was a dead breed. He was a real lifer. One of those hall-of-fame addicts, an alien cruising earth on his way to some big drug den in the sky. He never slept, at least he looked like he didn’t. He lived on dope, truckers speed, and cheap beer, and he always had this smile on his face, and when he was pissed the smile was still there only somehow it would turn sinister. As much as he drank and drugged, I never saw him blacked out either, or stumbling around, or vomiting behind some dumpster. He was always standing upright.

I followed Tommy to his place around the corner. A basement apartment in a run-down Victorian house owned by an old lady who thought Tommy was a “sweet young man.” Tommy kept a .38 pistol under his pillow, and I knew this because he pointed it at me one night thinking he was being funny. I sat down on Tommy’s puffy red recliner that looked like the victim of a knife fight. Tommy poured me a tequila. I was oozing sweat from every blackened pore in my body, desperate for the cure. Tommy could tell, and like a good doctor he cooked us up a speedball. Just the sight of dope dissolving in a bent spoon, that junk smell roaming the air, was enough to calm my nerves.

The speedball was a rare treat for me, and the shot sent us both to the moon.

Tommy tucked the pistol into his jeans. We got in my van, and gunned it over to the Sunoco Station, wild-eyed, licking our lips like we were about to split the atom. Outside the station we cut a few holes into a pair of skull caps and turned them into ski masks and yanked them over our desiccated faces. I grabbed a rusted hammer from my toolbox. Tommy pulled out the pistol, and I made him take the bullets out. I was kind of bothered that it took so much convincing for him to do that.

We blew into the station thinking we were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both of us shouting lines we’d heard from movies. Things like: “Get the fuck down!” and “Nobody move!” and “Hands in the air!” I bashed the hammer across a rack of candy, sending Skittles packages flying, thinking I was the toughest American in the world that night.

The only person in the place was Kyle’s old man. He was standing behind the register, arms folded over his beer gut. He didn’t even flinch. He recognized my voice, and he burst into laughter.

“The hell you two dopefiends doing?” he said.
Tommy waved the gun in his face, “You know what we’re doin’ grandpa. Now give it up!” he shouted.

Kyle’s old man pulled this huge sawed-off out from underneath the counter, cocked it, and pointed it back at Tommy, then at me.

Those two barrels looked like tunnels to hell, and the minute they were in my face I dropped my hammer, and shot my hands straight up in the air, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot.” My heart was already racing from the speedball and the adrenaline of the robbery, but now I felt like the thing was about to explode out of my chest.

“What the hell?” Tommy said, looking at me shaking with my hands up in the air.
“Gonna give you two about five seconds to get the fuck out of here,” Kyle’s dad said.
“Not without the money,” Tommy said.
Kyle’s dad started laughing louder. He put the sawed-off down, and he pointed at me. “You really need a new partner,” he said to Tommy.

Tommy looked at the wet spot expanding in the front of my pants, the urine leaking down my leg and puddling up at my feet. My eyes welled up with tears. I started sobbing right there under all those bright white fluorescent lights.

“Fuck this. I’m out of here,” Tommy said, tucking the pistol into his jeans and taking off.

I looked at Kyle’s dad, and he was shaking his head at me, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked confused, like he’d never seen so much weakness.

The scent of my own piss hit me hard in the face, and I ran out of the store. I got back in my van. I drove in circles around town. Kyle was right — I was a coward.

I parked the van outside Kelly’s Bar where they served pretty much anyone over sixteen back then, and n I saw the light was on inside. It was well past closing time, but through the front window I could see Tommy, feet up behind the bar, drinking alone and pouring shots for no one. I changed into another pair of jeans, which were also full of stains, but at least none of them were my own piss, and I wandered into the bar. I kept my head down as I took my usual stool. Tommy poured me one like a champ. A pint glass of tequila and soda. There was music playing, but I didn’t recognize the song. A celebration of failures was underway. We were worse off than we even thought we were. Tommy looked at me, somehow still smiling, said, “Somewhere along the way I missed something.”

Neither of us said much else, and we didn’t say a word about what had just happened. We sat at that bar obliterating ourselves. Smoking our souls to the filter. What else could we do with ourselves? All our world-sized feelings get ground down and fossilized into sad songs or unread books, into poems and promises, and then what? I wonder what all those future humans will think when they hear our songs and read our words. They’ll see something, but it won’t really be us. You can’t ever look at the dead completely.

A few days later I called Kyle, and she took me back, though it didn’t last much longer. I never did deserve her, and we all know how everything ends anyway. In those last months she never mentioned anything about the attempted robbery at the Sunoco. Her dad never told her or anyone else in town about it, and I never fully understood that, but I appreciated him for it.

I finally used my van to start a little moving company, started making enough to keep my balance on the poverty line. I even got a place of my own, a little apartment where I still shoot dope from time to time. Can’t really seem to kick that one. It’s a love hate relationship, but she’s been one of the few constants in my life. It’s hard to find any sort of stability. Nothing seems to stick around.

Kyle left town not long after we split. A couple years ago I heard she made it out west. Something about Utah or Idaho, one those places that those tangled spaghetti roads lead to. Somewhere I’ll never find. I’m glad she made it out of this place. That’s no small feat. The only other world I’ve seen is the one we built in seven days in the back of my van in that Walmart parking lot. The world made of dope and love. Sometimes I feel like I never really came down from those Walmart highs — wishful thinking maybe. Those parking lot days were so full of feeling, so devoid of real life. I guess I live in the past too much. Maybe that’s why I never look in the mirror. What man really wants to see what he’s become?

I do remember this one night, though, in the parking lot, when Kyle and I were sitting up in the front seats of the van, and we’d just done a shot, and we were nodding off looking at the empty Walmart lot like two old people on a porch staring off at their land and thinking about their lives. Then Kyle said, “It looks just like the moon here,” and I swear she was right. Ever since then every parking lot I see at night looks like a lunar landscape, or like something totally haunted or out of this world. Sometimes my own hometown, the only place I’ve ever known, looks like somewhere I’ve never been. Maybe it’s all the new construction and the growing population, or the fact that there’s a Whole Foods where Kelly’s Bar used to be. But I think it’s something else, too, like somehow, we can’t really know anywhere or anyone or anything, and even if we do, we can’t do anything about it. It’s sad to think like that, but also kind of nice to accept it sometimes. Mostly I try not to get too down about how things didn’t pan out for me or for most people I’ve known. Instead, I like to think how in the middle of this blur of a life I had those seven days in a Walmart parking lot, and that’s more than most people get.

XO