Impact
Short Story (Reupload)
October 9th, 1984.
This town feels like a graveyard around this time of night, its decrepit suburban homes standing motionless like tombstones in the October wind, the only audible sounds being the neighborhood dogs and cats howling in the distance. I shuffle my feet and light another cigarette, gazing out at the headlights of cars flying by like UFOs, wondering where all these people go at night, what they do with their wretched lives and what keeps them from swerving into oncoming traffic. I lean my head against my bedroom window frame and exhale smoke into the cold night air. Black Flag’s Damaged plays softly on my record player, not nearly as loud as it should be played, but I didn’t want my parents to know I’d bought it at the record store a couple weeks ago. They’d warned me against buying any punk records a few years ago when they saw a TV special on the Sex Pistols claiming that punk rock was more dangerous to the youth of today than communism. If only, I thought, taking another long drag. The album cover of Damaged seemed to call out to me, beckoning me to smash my window to pieces just like Henry Rollins, but I shook off this urge. I… need… to belo- I closed the window, slowly inching it down so as to not wake my parents and have them badger me about the smell of Marlboro’s emanating from my window.
Still wide awake from the speed Jimmy gave me earlier, I walked over to my bookshelf and scanned the spines. Justine, A Clockwork Orange, Ballard’s Crash, if it had blood, I’d probably read it. My eyes wander over to my high school yearbook. It had only been a couple months since I’d graduated, but already the hardcover of the book was collecting dust. I pulled it out of the bookshelf, taking in the cover before opening it. Bengals, Class of 1984. I opened up the yearbook, flipping through the pages until I came across someone I recognized. There, on page 67, I saw her face. Annabelle Ferris, I used to sit behind her in pre-calculus in my sophomore year. I used to zone out, staring at her flowing blonde locks while the teacher babbled on about trigonometry and shit like that. I would intentionally drop my pencil by her feet so that she would turn around and hand it back to me, just to get a glimpse at her smile. She was a heartbreaker, that’s for sure. We never really talked much outside of that class, I don’t think she cared for my uncombed hair and ripped blue jeans caked with mud around the ankles. She was in the honor’s society, I was barely passing my classes. Too many sick days spent hanging out in empty lots. I stared at her picture for a while, wondering what she might be up to right now. Was she out partying with her friends? Was she in the arms of some football player, getting teenage kicks in the back of his Cadillac? Or maybe with an honor’s society guy, wool sweater elbows brushing ever so slightly on her cotton sheets as they flip through a shared physics textbook? Or was she just asleep, resting peacefully, unaware that one of her old classmates was lying awake thinking of her, too strung out to sleep and too cowardly to tell the people in his life how he really feels. I started to form a lump in my throat, but I choked it back, putting away the yearbook and grabbing one of the Playboy mags from under my mattress. Debi Johnson is this month’s Playmate. I rubbed one out, flashes of Annabelle and suicide by shotgun shooting through my head as I climaxed.
Tossing the magazine across my cluttered bedroom, I wondered if smoking a joint would make it any easier to fall asleep, only to remember I was fresh out of weed, and that I couldn’t get any more for a while since I’d spent what little money I’d made working the Burger King drive-through over summer on records already. I sighed, begrudgingly accepting that this was going to be another long, unforgiving night. The record stopped, leaving the ticking clock mocking me from across the room.
I awoke around 2 PM to the sound of my mother pounding her fist on my door. She’d been on my case since I got fired from Burger King in August. A particularly irritating customer said he thought the FUCK COPS tattoo on my left arm was “unprofessional” and wanted to complain to my manager, so I accidentally spilled his Diet Coke all over his clean white shirt. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that my manager was watching me from the kitchen until it was already too late. I was sent home early that day and told I’d be blacklisted from working at any Burger King establishment in the country. Since that day, my mother had been giving me death stares every time I left my room.
“Wake your lazy ass up!” she yelled through the door. “What happened to finding a job today?”
“Getting dressed now, mom!” I shouted back, slumping out of bed. I looked around my room. My Kieth Richards poster stared back at me, his eyes forever locked in place, clouded with what I’d guess is either cocktail of heroin and cocaine, or simply the flash of the paparazzi’s camera flashes. I slipped into my ragged black Levi’s and threw on my faded Ramones t-shirt, then put on my light blue dress shirt and buttoned it up to make it look like I was heading to a job interview. I grabbed my denim jacket and opened the bedroom door, brushing past my scowling mother and heading downstairs to put on my shoes.
“Don’t come home ‘til you’ve got yourself a job, young man,” she said as I started to head out the door. “I’m sick of you laying around the house.” I didn’t respond; I just kept walking until I made it to the bus stop. There was only one other person waiting there, an older black woman with her hood over her head. It was only when I saw her shivering that I noticed how cold it was today, the afternoon wind biting at my ears and nose. The bus arrived, and we both got on. I sat towards the back of the bus across the aisle from a fat bearded man in a flannel shirt. He looked like he might have been homeless, but I couldn’t say for sure. I leaned my head on the window and unbuttoned my dress shirt as I watched people walking along the sidewalk. Parents walked their children home from school, local perverts leered with their hands in their front pockets, crossing guards yelled in vain at speeding cars, and police officers harassed black high schoolers. After about a 15 minute bus ride, during which the bus driver played a Madonna tape that made me want to vomit with boredom, I got off the bus and walked out into the shopping district. The sky was gray and the air smelled slightly of urine and cigarette butts. I looked down the street and started wandering, not searching for anything or anywhere in particular, just hoping to kill time.
This was my ritual whenever Mom got on my case about finding a job. I would take the bus downtown and stumble aimlessly around the local shops, occasionally stopping by a record store or buying weed if I had money on me, but my pockets were bone-dry today. On days like these, I would usually just sit on a bench somewhere and smoke reds, watching all the businessmen in suits walk by. They seemed to swing their briefcases in unison, marching down the sidewalk like Hitler Youth or some sort of pistons in a factory. Occasionally I would see something interesting like a homeless guy overdosing on the sidewalk or a cop chasing a petty thief through a crowd of voyeuristic pedestrians, but more often than not it was just businessmen and briefcases, pigeons and ice cream vendors, migrant workers and stock broker pigs, junkies and winos, all the elements of urban America coming together like organs in a bloated seal.
I lit up a cigarette and looked across the street. A head of golden hair caught my eye, and I wondered if it could possibly be Annabelle, as if masturbating to the thought of her last night had magically willed her back into my life, like a rose lily in bloom after being watered. Sure enough, as she started to get closer, I could see that it was indeed her. Her face was slightly rounder than it had been in sophomore year, but she was still as beautiful as ever. She was wearing a dark blue skirt and a matching suit jacket, almost like a flight attendant. Around her neck, a shiny pearl necklace, no doubt an expensive birthday present. I nearly set my jeans on fire as the cigarette fell from my mouth. Suddenly, I was 15 and nervous all over again. I could practically feel the pimples sprouting on my face. I put on my sunglasses and hoped she wouldn’t recognize me, but when she walked on by without acknowledging me, I immediately regretted trying to hide my face. Idiot. I never was good at finding my voice around girls, especially the ones who I knew would hate my guts if they ever got to know me. The cheerleaders, the hair-metal groupies, even the surprisingly youthful woman with thick-rimmed glasses who worked at the public library, they always had a way of making me freeze up.
I started to walk back to the bus stop, kicking myself for not saying something to Annabelle, but then again, what would I have said? We barely spoke in school; she probably wouldn’t remember me even if I explained who I was. On my way back, an old man stopped me outside of the old pharmacy.
“Hey, kid,” he said in a gravelly plea, “I’m about 10 cents short of a pack of cigarettes, can you help a brother out?” I almost told him I was flat broke but decided to check the pockets of my denim jacket first. Sure enough, I found a quarter in the right-chest pocket of my jacket and handed it to the man.
“Thank you, man,” he said to me, smiling, exposing his missing teeth. “God bless you.”
“No problem,” I muttered, still thinking about Annabelle. The man walked into the pharmacy, and I continued down the street, kicking an old Budweiser can along the way. I thought about turning around, looking for Annabelle, maybe asking her if she was free for coffee sometime, but I knew deep down it was pointless. She was probably seeing somebody, and even if she wasn’t, what are the chances she’d go out with the town leper?
I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to forget about her and move on with my day, but by then my mood had been soured beyond repair. I turned into an alley, avoiding the eyes of the crackhead staring me down. Behind a dumpster, a dirty, middle-aged couple were deep in the thralls of passion on a tossed couch, the man’s spotted hand slipped down the front of the woman’s tattered jeans as their tongues interlocked like mating snails. I hurried past, trying my best to pretend I hadn’t seen them, but right as I made it to the edge of the alley, I could hear the old man call out “Hey, why not take a picture, asshole?” I shuddered slightly and continued to make my way to the bus stop, glancing at the Hispanic street preacher warning each and every passerby about the growing influence of Satanic cults in the United States federal government and public school systems.
“Remember Adam Walsh?” she shouted in a thick accent. “La policia would have you believe that no killer has been found, but it is not true! He was violated and killed by Ronald Reagan himself, the beast with six letters in each of his names! We must all come together and pray. Pray with me, por favor, my fellow children of Christ, we are living in wicked times.”
Suddenly, a loud crash followed by several screams in the distance grabs the attention of everyone on the street. All at once, the crowd began moving towards the collision like moths to a streetlamp, flies to shit, vultures to a dehydrated rodent. I started to push my way through the crowd, hoping to get a glimpse at what had stopped the bustle of Main Street, but my heart stopped when I got close enough to see the spectacle.
A battered white Corvette lay in the middle of the road, its front end covered in blood and debris, the front-left wheel rolled into the grass on the island. The front windshield was shattered, like Jackson Pollock had taken up ice sculpting. The front license plate, which read ROADKNG, hung from a single screw, mangled and misshapen from the impact.
“I swear, I didn’t see her at all,” the driver pleaded as a police officer led him into the back of a squad car. “She came out of nowhere, officer.”
“Save it for the trial, pal,” the officer barked as he slammed the door on the driver, who looked as pale as a corpse hanging his head in the backseat. It was then that I finally saw it, the body crumpled underneath the deformed sports car. It was as if the vehicle were some sort of great white shark, swallowing the body of a naive surfer who had swum too far out. The body was barely visible through the smoke and wreckage, but one thing I definitely saw was the golden blonde hair soaking in a still pool of oil and blood. As I looked closer, I noticed the loose pearls strewn about the pavement like marbles glinting in the afternoon sun. I felt nauseous, so I turned and pushed through the growing crowd, racing towards a trash can. It was too late; I vomited all over my shoes before I could make it to the bin. An old woman looked at me and covered her mouth in disgust before turning back towards the wreckage. After attempting to clean myself up with leaves that had died and fallen to the ground, crumbling under the shoes of people strolling by, I slowly made my way back to the bus stop, but the bus driver wouldn’t let me on the bus with streaks of puke down my shirt and pants, so with a heavy heart and dizzy head, I started making my way home on foot.
As I trudged home, I thought of a song I’d heard by the Rolling Stones on Jimmy’s radio the other day. We had just taken speed, and whether or not it was just the onset of the drugs rushing dopamine into my brain, the opening verse really spoke to me in that moment.
Went out walking through the wood the other day,
And the world was a carpet laid before me,
The buds were bursting and the air smelled sweet and strange,
It seemed about a hundred years ago…
I muttered these words to myself over and over as I made it to the front step of my house, the sun having long set by now and the air cold and uncaring. Pushing past my mother, who was demanding to know where I’d been all day and why my clothes were such a mess, I ran up the stairs and locked myself in my bedroom, lighting a cigarette as I hung up my denim jacket. It was only then that the dam flooded and I began to sob, wondering if I could have done anything to intervene. Maybe if I had just worked up the nerve to go talk to her, she wouldn’t have tried to cross the street at the same time as that fucking idiot shot through the intersection. Maybe, even if she’d rejected me, I could have wasted just enough of her time to inadvertently save her life. I sighed and took a long drag. There was really no use in maybe’s. Not before, and certainly not now. I looked through my record collection until I came across my copy of Goats Head Soup. I put it on my turntable and cranked the volume up to ten, letting the music drown out my tears well into the night. In the morning, I will wake up, and it will just be another day. New cars will pass through town, new drivers will become new criminals, and new families will cry over the bodies of their loved ones, coldly taken from them far too soon. I snuffed my cigarette on the outer windowsill and tossed the butt into the abyss below.