My Friend Casey

Casey’s girlfriend, Melissa, dumped him a few weeks ago. They lived together in downtown L.A. in an apartment that costs money to rent on a street with an amazing burrito truck and fewer screaming homeless people than other streets nearby. It really is a hell of a place. The last time I was there he took me to La Cita, this bar a few blocks from his place that was full of people who could beat me up and who had tattoos, and the bartender was super pretty with not just arm tattoos but neck tattoos, and I panicked and drank, like, eleven beers, and more importantly than the eleven beers is the shot of Jameson I took, and I only took it because my friend, Casey, got it from an even prettier bartender. 

I don’t normally drink hard liquor because it mixes with my medicine and causes me to enter what can best be described as a biblical-level fugue state, but like I said, this girl was so fucking goddamn perfect. She looked like Kate Hudson mixed with Kate Hudson’s famous mom, whose name escapes me. 

So, I took it, and I wandered away, and I was just out and walking and it was so late. It was warm in the night and I tasted salt and I walked, and I don’t remember much other than the walking and not seeing anything well and hearing some kind of pulsating screech deep behind my ears, behind wax and brain in some throbbing space full of scary shit, and then talking to an owl-faced man in a big grey hoodie who looked a little bit like my dad, and I remember sharing my pack of cigarettes with him while we walked, and I remember being near a trash can that was burning and in a wide street filled with cars while the owl-faced man stared at me across the lights with unmoving heavy austere, professorial eyebrows, drawing on the smoke from the cigarette I gave him and staring without expression as I dragged my cement-block feet away from six lanes of traffic. He looked at me like that and knew everything I’d ever done. It was disgusting. I did not catch his name.

Then he was gone and it was more walking, and every street sign was unreadable and everything on my phone screen was unreadable and everyone I spoke to ran from me. The ringing in my ears was incredible, like a metallic siren song of one sustained holler of a note. I Helen-Kellered through the streets and woke up to an adorable fat man in a Dodgers cap and a denim jacket and denim pants and a denim shirt waking me up, and he was so excited, and he screamed unto me in a voice like how an angel’s voice should sound:

“Are you fucking dumb bro you can’t sleep on these streets motherfucker get up go the fuck home and—”

And I did get up, motherfucker, and I saw I was on Casey’s street. I had wandered the big heavy metal of L.A. and found my way back to Colorado Avenue, with all its splendor. I walked back to the nice apartment with the framed Pulp Fiction movie poster and the framed Reservoir Dogs movie poster and the framed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood movie poster and I banged on the door until I was let in. Casey was asleep. Melissa had her hair pulled back in a hard screw and she did not look happy to see me. 

So, like I said, he lives in a nice neighborhood, and I know this because I slept on the sidewalk in that downtown neighborhood at 2:30 in the morning on a Saturday and nobody fucked me or took my shit or killed me.

***

That’s how it’s always worked with me and Casey. Casey goes out and gets drunk, he laughs with strangers, he moves from patio to patio in the fabled, steel-heavy sweat of DTLA and Echo Park and Silver Lake and Skid Rokyo, and everywhere else, with his hair waving down over his shoulder blades and his joints burning perfectly and his cadence and syntax gelling like sperm and egg and growing, flowing for the ladies and the gents who come to him, bar-side, for the Good Word, and everything from his mouth communicates a simple, time-tested sentiment:

I am someone you will want to know some day, so you might as well know me now.

Me? I go out and drink and I enter the strange purgatory of a heavy-footed lockstep march toward shame and self-loathing and possible bodily harm. I plummet. My curly hair grows frizzy when I am stressed, and my joints all canoe and burn out, and I make people feel nothing but a sort of gut-warning stirring in their lower abdomen, something they may confuse with an Irritable Bowel Syndrome flare-up at the time but, later at home, will realize that it was their soul warning them to get the fuck away from the nervous guy yelling and sweating through his white Oxford, laughing too hard at nothing. 

***

Casey and Melissa. They were together for years. This does not matter, because they broke up, and they never had kids or anything. So fuck it. They had cats. Casey hates kids. 

Casey hates anything that might take his money. 

They dumped each other after she fucked some bartender at her work. Casey showed me what the guy looked like on his Instagram page. His Instagram page had many action-shots of him mixing drinks in a skin-tight tuxedo t-shirt. He had an under-shave haircut that I recognized from my days of substitute teaching in middle schools. He had a tattoo of a crucifix on one forearm. On the other, he had biblical verses. He smiled with a white smile. He was trying to be an actor. He was trying to be a model. Casey said he was a cunt. 

Casey found out when he stumbled home hammered and looked through her DMs. He told me all of this on the phone and he was upset when he told me. I pointed out that he’d been miserable forever and had slept with a girl from his work, like, five times, like, five years ago.

“That’s immaterial, dude,” he said. I did not argue.

She moved out, to somewhere. Casey went to La Cita every night after they broke up. He would work at a diner over in Los Feliz until the late afternoon, then he would go to La Cita and get hammered and ram his cock into someone. Casey is different than me, in the sense that Casey speaks to women and they fall all over him. He is something like Zeus in that regard. I respect him very much for his ability to be loved. 

The only woman who ever loved me was Giorgia. I know she loved me because last summer, when the world was still, she grew soft and malleable against me as we lay in bed under tyrannical heat, touching sticky skin to sticky skin even when humid moonlight felt like a big bath the whole town was resting in. Supine, she’d sleep while I listened to her breath grow so faint it was as if she left her body for a few hours each night, going somewhere exotic and fresh deep in her curls and shadows. She’d purr in her sleep, pillow lips against my acne-soaked shoulder. Now, when I fall asleep alone at night, I wonder if she’s thinking of me.

 I believe she is.

I have a lot of dreams where she’s taking me somewhere in her car, very late, and everything feels like a secret, and then I fall out of the car, and then I wake up shrieking with loss once I realize I’m not bloodied on the side of the road, her hands bandaging the leaks, but instead I’m alone, gasping for breath in a town full of strangers.

Casey calls me one night:

“Elijah,” he says, his lips thick with beer when he speaks. I hear music in the background. It is Judas Priest. He is at La Cita listening to fucking Priest, surrounded by a lot of people. It sounds amazing, the voices and the rustling inertia of the cosmopolitan evening. He sucks on a cigarette after he says my name, too, and I am also very jealous of that. I miss cigarettes and beer. He calls me as I sit in my tiny apartment in my tiny town with my tiny job working with tiny kids, showing them how to do math and shit. It is not a good job.

“I don’t miss her,” he says. Then he just breathes a lot. Like I said, he is drunk. Priest gives way to Motley Crue and I almost cry, I am filled with such envy. The beer. The smoke. The CRUE.

“That’s good, man,” I say. I am having a Hungry-Man meal and watching The Sopranos, but I like taking a break from that to talk to Casey. He is my best friend.

“But she keeps texting me, dude.”
“Like…good texting?”

He sighs. It’s a lot. “She keeps texting me saying she wants to come see the cats and see me. What the fuck is that?”

“I do not know,” I say, because I do not know. “Are you going to see her?”

“I guess,” he says. “I’ve been seeing this goth chick, though. Remember? I told you about her?”

He did not tell me about her—I would have remembered any goth chick who was fucking my friend, because I listen to things Casey tells me. 

I tell him as much. 

He immediately texts me a picture. It is a picture of a girl who cannot be taller than four-foot-six. She has black hair and she appears to be of South American descent. She is wearing something like whiteface, which, though it is certainly not like blackface, it is bizarre to behold. She has a tattoo of an angel spreading its wings across her neck and collarbone. She looks exhausted. More than that. She looks almost sick with lack of sleep and the purple under her eyes glows beneath the caked-on white makeup. She took this picture in a mirror and behind her is possibly the filthiest bedroom I’ve ever seen—bowls of old cereal-milk congealing on the floor, cups half-filled with orange liquid everywhere, Chick-Fil-A bags shredded on a chair, clothes in piles as tall as she is, a litterbox overflowing with shit, a window covered with a tacked-up red sheet that gives light through little holes. She has what appear to be at least Double-D-size breasts, probably bigger, and she’s not wearing a shirt. Her breasts have bite marks on the nipples. I wonder if she’s breastfeeding. I wonder if the child she’s breastfeeding lives in that horrible room. I wonder if Casey has met the child and if she’s let him hold the child. I decide that if he has, and she has, then she’s a horrid mother for letting a mountain-man looking stranger hold flesh that came from her inside. 

I can smell this picture.

“She’s hot,” I say. 

“Yep.”

I am furious. Judas Priest has turned into Pantera. Pantera is playing in the background and Casey is listening to my favorite fucking band around a bunch of cool goth girls. I am eating a now-cold TV dinner with the TV off while my neighbor, Ed—who is a terrifying fireman—blends smoothies for his week of meal-prep next door. He is always bettering himself and being healthy and meal-prepping. Sometimes, I wish I had a gun, just so I could go over and kill Ed.

“So, what’s the plan?” I ask.

“I’m going to go fuck Melissa.”

I eat my food. I watch The Sopranos. I masturbate directly into the toilet. I walk around the apartment. I go outside, down the big tall stairwell and to the street, and I start walking toward the river. I walk for a while. It’s at least three miles to the river. I stand at the edge of the river and look out over at Avery’s Castle, the old ruins that always look spooky in the setting sun but dumpy and ugly in the day. The ferry is not running. I am devastated.

Casey calls me back as the sun is setting and the castle is starting to look handsome. It is eight o’ clock here. It is five in LA. Casey has been at the bar for at least two hours already. This seems concerning, even for him.

“I just fucked Melissa,” he says.

“Nice,” I say, though I am not sure if it’s nice.

I go inside as it gets dark. It is Friday night, so there is nothing to prepare for. Everything in Revere closes when the sun goes down. I get in my car and start to drive. I end up at my ex-girlfriend’s house. I think of going to the door. I think of saying hey, Giorgia, I miss you, remember all the ways you need me? but her dad is tanning in the yard and I speed up and fly past her driveway. I circle back around to downtown Barrington and pull into a parking space at Boston Market. I have a hot chicken sandwich and macaroni and cheese and four Diet Cokes. I piss blood in the bathroom and worry I have a kidney stone or prostate cancer. I get another Diet Coke to go. Casey calls again as I drive home.

“I just fucked the goth.”

Metallica is playing at the bar. I can hear it. He’s back at the bar. He fucked her at the bar after fucking Melissa at her house. The Metallica sounds awesome. I hang up. There’s only so much a man can take.

***

Time passes and nothing important happens. A week or two, then more. Casey is sleeping with his ex, Melissa, and the goth, whose name happens to be Melanie. Shitty name for a goth girl, in my opinion. I have a hard time sleeping. I go to Target and just walk around, looking at the clothes and smelling the old popcorn from the Pizza Hut in the corner of the store. Employees watch me, but I don’t take anything. I do laps. I cum in the toilet. I leave. I stay up more. 

A child bites me at work. I refrain from hitting the child. I reward myself with Boston Market. Yes, the one by my ex-girlfriend’s house. Yes, I’ve eaten there twenty-three times in four weeks. It is nighttime when Casey calls again. I am eating meatloaf in the clean, quiet restaurant.

“Elijah.”

“Yes.”

“I’m fucked.”

“Why?”

He breathes heavy, hard. There’s no music. I’m shocked. It’s after six in LA, which means he should definitely be at La Cita.

Casey tells me Melissa’s pregnant. I spill my Diet Coke everywhere. Then he tells me Melanie is also pregnant. 

“How?”

“I fucked them both, Elijah.”

“You don’t use condoms?”

“How old are you?” he asks me.

I don’t have much to say. I feel bad for my friend. I am also feeling very jealous again. Jealous of the drama and intrigue. Of all of it.

I drive home. I drink some Dewar’s White Label my dad sent me. That is his favorite. He drinks it neat, but that makes me sick, so I mix it with the rest of my Diet Coke. I watch TV. I drink more of the scotch. I turn off the TV and put on Shout at the Devil, my favorite Motley Crue album. I have another drink and turn it up. Ed bangs on the wall. I turn it up. Ed starts blending like a motherfucker. I walk over to Cumberland Farms and get cigarettes. I smoke one. I throw up. I have missed smoking. I drink more scotch. I call him around four.

“Dude,” he says. “How are you awake?”

“Were you asleep?”

“God, no.”

“I’m drunk,” I say.

“Alright,” he says. He is distracted with his pregnancies, I know.

I light a cigarette and I suck it in like he does at the bar when he calls me every day. I take a drink. I cough. I take another drink. It’s all spinning. Finally.

“Elijah?”

“They’ll both keep the babies,” I say. I’m not asking, but he misunderstands.

“Yeah, that seems to be the plan. They’re pumped.” He is quiet. 

“Sorry.”

“I don’t know what to do. I’m so fucked.” Then, he cries. I let him.

Then the phone is dead and I’m sitting. There is no moon in the sky. I try to watch The Sopranos. My internet is on the fritz. I lay awake in utter blackness of night in a room that is too hot. Giorgia is sleeping under the same moonless night as me. I like that.

***

Casey’s jacket is kind of big on me. Also, it’s summer—I’m drenched in hot sweat before I even get in the car—but that is, as Casey would say, “immaterial.” I drive out of Revere listening to Judas Priest. I put on Motley Crue and listen to it the whole way up Route 4. Once I reach Barrington, I throw on the Pantera. Cowboys From Hell. I wear aviator shades. I don’t smoke Newports, but Camel Blue’s, Casey’s brand. I smoke one, then the next.

As I drive, I play with the safety pin I used to poke holes in the four Trojan condoms I found in the pocket of my best friend’s coat. I pop the pin out, tuck it back in. I slip as I’m turning onto the main drag and I prick my finger and see crimson emerge. I crank the fucking music. I wear my mother’s ring so I don’t lose it before I get there.

I stop at Boston Market. People stare at me and my coat and my shades and my glory. I turn to the old woman eating her meatloaf at the table next to mine. I spear a piece of chicken-fried steak smothered in white sauce and I point it at her. She squints at me through Harry Potter glasses. There are brown spots all over her neck.

“I am someone you will want to know some day, so you might as well know me now,” I say, accentuating my dominant syllables by stabbing the fork in her direction.

She does not respond. I finish my food. I walk out of there with a massive Diet Coke with no lid and a cigarette burning in my mouth. It is at least ninety degrees. I pull my car out of the parking lot—blasting Motley Crue again, “Kickstart My Heart,” to get the mood right—and drive out away from the center of town.

***

Giorgia’s house feels like home when I pull in the driveway. It is small, but well-maintained. Her mother is a tasteful decorator. Her father is a funny man, and he keeps his lawn very neat and tight. I take it all in: the above-ground pool out in the yard, the scattering of wild rabbits nestled in the grass by the elegant sunflower garden roasting in the unobstructed glare of heat from the sky over by the detached garage. Giorgia’s little green car right there in the dirt lot when I pull up next to it. Everything feels natural. I step out.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” 

It’s her father. He is large and has one eyebrow and wears a thick gold chain around his muscular neck. He is working on his boat in the garage, something he does a lot between jobs. He works at night. I like him very much.

“Hi!” I say, offering a wave. “It’s me, Elijah! How are ya?”

“Yeah,” he says, emerging from the garage, oil-soaked newspaper shuffling against his sandals as he walks. “I know who the fuck you are. And I asked: what are you doing here?”

He stops walking for a second and kind of cocks his head to the side. “And what the fuck are you wearing?”

Before I can answer that I am wearing an outfit that I feel represents my alternative, heavy metal, cowboy poet, West-coast-romantic-chic sensibilities, he waves me off.

“She doesn’t wanna see you, Elijah.”

The front door to the house opens. We both look up to see Giorgia standing there in a red sundress, elegant, lifting her gait and poise up against the daylight like an Italian Scarlett O’Hara. Her father says more things to me, but I do not hear them. Giorgia’s hair is longer, and light in the summer, the dark oakwood brown leading up to whisps of auburn and almost-blonde, the new, bright, foreign roots cascading down into the old dark hairs I held between my fingers in a different time. She looks younger than she did when she left me.

I raise my sunglasses. I squint at her.

“Elijah,” she says. 

In this moment, I know we just need to be alone in a room for her to remember the nights when we didn’t sleep, when we made love and lay together on the sweat-slicked wood floor of her bedroom and listened to the roar of crickets and wind in the summer. But she looks confused. Her mouth opens, then closes. She stares. She takes in my clothes—I see her doing it, with those dark midnight lake water eyes. I let her. I wait. Then her father is in my face again, obscuring my line of vision.

“Elijah, get the fuck out of here.”

I reach in my pocket and caress the violated condoms, sleek in their undressed wrapping.

“I’m going in.”

He gets closer, yelling:

“I swear to GOD, Elij—” 

“I’m going in.”

When I move toward her, I don’t mean to break into a run. It just happens. I just want to ask her. I’m suddenly very, very nervous. Almost lost, here in a home that used to be sort of mine. I just want to talk without her dad here. She still looks so confused. As I mount the stairs, and as she turns away, and as her father lowers his shoulder into my ribcage, all I can think of is how bad I wish I left my stereo running in the car blasting Boston or Guns N Roses, or fucking Metallica, and how Casey would have done that, how Casey would have already done what needed to be done.