The screen door banged open then screeched shut like a dying seagull.
I looked up from our pissy couch towards the front door. It was pissy because months ago, Grant let his co-worker Jamie – currently between-homes – crash on our couch for what became the majority of our lease.
++++
Two months in, Jamie found an abandoned greyhound puppy tied up outside the lesbian bar she used as hunting grounds. It was after closing time, and the puppy was wet, shivering, wild-eyed with confusion and heartbreak. She saw herself in the skinny little thing – who she named "Arrow" – but was never home to train her or clean up after her. Arrow shit on the floor, pissed on the couch, and chewed the carpet in my bedroom to shreds while I was in class. Classic canine abandonment anxiety.
But all that was months ago. Jamie had since disappeared without a trace and taken Arrow with her, leaving only her one duffle bag of clothes and one Ziploc of toiletries. No one at the theater or the bar had any idea where she'd gone, but the piss smell lingered. There was no world where I'd be getting my security deposit back.
++++
Grant bolted the door and entered the kitchen, tossing his key-ring onto the tile counter. He was sweating through his 100% polyester movie theater uniform: black pants with a matching vest, a brass nameplate. Without taking another step, he stripped down to his boxers, kicked his pants into the corner where Arrow's bowl used to sit, and noticed me: the soft pink blob on the couch. Dark eyes judging me, face hardening, he went to the kitchen sink to splash cold water on his face.
++++
Grant and I met in English class junior year at our private high school. Our teacher was an alum who'd returned to live out his own Dead Poet's Society fantasies, coaxing impressionable minds to reach inside ourselves for "the sublime." At seventeen, I was a dissociated rhesus monkey in a suburban cage; writing stories were my only weapon to stab back the life being forced on me by family/school/society while feeling around blind for the boundaries of possible alternatives. I'd been writing my own stories, making up worlds since I was ten; I didn't need or want any hand-holding.
During our survey of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (read aloud in Middle English to bring its fourteenth-century characters alive), our teacher assigned us to create our own pilgrim and write their tale. Bringing my full teen-emo to the assignment, my pilgrim was "The Cannibal" who followed Chaucer's traveling party at a safe distance until he could start picking them off one by one, making campfire stews of each until he could declare which was the tastiest.
The day I presented my story to our class, I freaked most of them out, found myself cornered afterwards by a football player who sat in the back of class. I knew his name was Grant, but we'd never spoken: a looming six-two mountain of shoulders and unblinking eyes, he was a jock but a weird one, also captain of our school's multi-year championship-winning Chess Team.
Before I enrolled in private school, I was in the Dade County Public School system. Getting cornered by a football player meant your ass gonna get stomped to remind you of your place in the social order. My nerves were jangling; I assumed my story had upset him or someone he liked. I was ready to defend myself or flee. Instead, he spoke in a soft, self-conscious voice:
GRANT: Hey, Dan. I really liked your story. In class. Actually, I like all the stories you've written for class. You're really, um, good.
ME [taken aback]: Oh. Uh, thanks... Grant.
GRANT: I also want to be a wr--
He sucked his words back inside before they escaped, ears and neck flushing red. Looking down at me with my bag lunch, I understood that he kinda looked up to me. At least to my writing.
ME [to the rescue]: Oh. You write stories too?
GRANT: NO. No... but I'm trying. I have a few that aren't finished, yet. I want to write novels like... you know the "metafiction" guys from the '70s? Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, uh, Gardner, William H. Gass...?
I was only familiar with John Gardner; our class read his Grendel together at the beginning of that year, and I'd reread it twice since. It's still one of my favorites.
GRANT: Huh. I thought they'd be your guys. My father had a lot of their books around the house. Your stories remind me of that style a bit, that... self-awareness. Writing that feels like it knows it's a piece of writing.
Now it was my turn to blush. I didn't even know what to say. I felt seen.
Flattery picks the lock of the insecure heart.
++++
Leaving English class the next day, Grant invited me to eat lunch with his crew, all members of the Chess Team. They were mostly math and science geeks who we alienated by excitedly chattering about novelists and indie films and bands we thought no one else listened to, realizing how much we actually had in common. Before long, we called each other friends.
Post-Christmas break, I re-tested for AP English and got placed with the Ivy-bound students, the brightest lights in our college-feeder school. They were all scary-brilliant but also somehow not real teenagers, just young Type-A adults with their entire beings rocketing full-burn towards college admissions. I didn't make any real friends there, kept eating lunch with Grant.
We stayed close all the way through graduation.
++++
These days, Grant was lanky. Hard-earned football muscle melted off in the two years since we'd taken very separate paths.
I stayed in Miami, attending university stuffed full of psychiatrist-prescribed Lithium that made it impossible to stay awake during morning classes, while Grant fucked off to Spain. Intending to start college and explode into my true self, I was badly overmedicated. I stopped writing, drawing, didn't have a sexual urge for over three years. Grant wrote his first novel longhand in the cafes of Madrid, got engaged to two different local girls – both named Maria – who I'd only seen in blurry Polaroids.
Then, in the summer of 1994, Grant returned to South Florida penniless and heart-broken with just a backpack containing three precious belongings: the only-existing typed manuscript of his unpublished first novel, a composition notebook where he was outlining his second, and the speed-chess clock he used to help him focus in short bursts.
Grant moved back in with his drunk, possibly-schizophrenic mother in what he called a "closed regression loop": sleeping in his childhood bed, treated like a child, caring for a parent who couldn't manage her own breakfast. He was desperate to get his freedom back, but he had no credit score, no income.
I was back home for the summer too, helping my currently-divorcing parents pack up our just-sold home before we all scattered to the four winds, and looking for a roommate to share my first off-campus apartment. It was a two-bedroom corner unit facing the rear loading dock of a Publix. In the early mornings, delivery trucks brought fresh meat to the supermarket, discarded the past-sell-date meat into the dumpster just beneath our living room window to fester in the sun. Whenever Grant and I stopped smoking cigarettes and weed, the reek was sickening.
++++
Grant kicked off his low-tops one at a time like a can-can dancer, arcing them across the living room, soles scuffing the far wall's paint. His toes peeked through holes in his socks and wiggled as he lit a cigarette, side-eying me:
GRANT: How can you be taking a siesta when you don't even work..?
He managed to work references from "his time in Ethpaña" into every goddamn conversation that year, each one triggering my instant eyerolls.
GRANT [sitting down] This is what college students get to do while regular people work? Fuckin' sign me up!
The vibe between us was growing spikier since Jamie and Arrow vanished.
ME: There was a sign-up. It was called "college applications."
His jaw clenched and I regretted taking the cheap shot. Grant was the only senior in our class not to go on to university. While he puffed his chest and said "academic life is detrimental to the writer's animal instinct," I knew his parents hated each other so much they couldn't sit at a table long enough to co-sign a financial aid form. No one on earth had his back. That's why he fucked off to Ethpaña.
GRANT: Well, you're up now, right? Cause I'm gonna take a shower, put on some music and do some writing--
ME: And smoke a fat one?
He smiled big, I smiled big, teeth versus teeth: "The Fat One" remained the neutral zone between our clashing egos. He dug the cigar box out of his desk drawer and rolled up a double-wide spliff that he puffed until its cherry glowed. We smoked and coughed until no one wanted anymore and crushed it out in our stolen Denny's ashtray:
GRANT: So... what's going on with you? Your energy lately is extra... defeated.
He folded his legs beneath himself, soles of his feet coated in Arrow's fur, though she'd been gone nearly three months.
ME: "Extra defeated"...? Fuck you, man. Weren't you gonna work on your novella?
GRANT: Novel.
ME: I'm tired because I was at Velvet Creme Donuts all afternoon working on my short film pitch to direct next semester!
Not an answer to his question, but a status report from my internal mirror.
GRANT: Right... sorry for trying to be your friend.
He got up and went to take a shower. I folded my arms across my chest, flabby muscles pressing against the little Taco Bell boobies under my Sebadoh t-shirt.
++++
Grant emerged from the shower minutes later wearing his only towel, once white, now gray with mildew. Its funk overpowered the fog of weed smoke and the maggot-meat dumpster outside.
GRANT: Do you know if you're depressed or just absurdly high all the time? Cause sometimes I don't know how to manage... this with you.
ME [depressed and absurdly high]: Both, for sure... but I do feel... broken.
GRANT: This is about... her, right?
He knew better than to speak her name in our house. Hearing him say it would've sent me into a red spiral. Even unspoken, her invisible presence had power.
GRANT: Look, if I didn't care, I wouldn't even say this, man: you're not broken. You're just a pussy with no self-confidence.
ME [one middle finger]: Fuck. You.
GRANT: Am I wrong? You wrote a screenplay to tell her your true feelings... [chuckles] But you never told her those feelings to her face!
All I wanted was to walk away from him, from this apartment, skip ahead to the next part of my life, one he wasn't in.
ME [two middle fingers]: I already have a therapist.
GRANT: Yeah, who's doping you harder than you're doping yourself! [shaking his head] You need to get free of all this shit! Fuckin' transcend!
++++
One night about three months ago, Grant and I were smoking with our neighbors' crib down the hall, two hippies named Chuck and Parrish who were also in the UM film track, plus a tiny speed-metal guitarist named Eddie who'd been crashing on their couch all year (everybody had a Jamie). Chuck was dating a new girl he'd met at a Grateful Dead show who dealt acid; she'd given him a Ziploc full of tiny paper squares individually-stamped with a phoenix in red ink.
CHUCK [showing us the baggie]: Jackie calls them "Red Birds."
In their candle-lit apartment with tie-dyed Bob Marley and Jerry Garcia tapestries on the walls, the young men laughed, licked their lips, opened their wallets. My hands stayed in my lap because I was Grendel, always circling the hearth-fire from a distance. I was "The Cannibal of Canterbury." Behind my eyelids, pulsing capillaries distributed the Lithium I'd accepted like a eucharist throughout my brain. I'd sworn to my parents and doctors to take it, without disclosing that I'd continue to smoke weed 24/7. My memory of self pre-Lithium was hazy, soft-focused while I remained here in Numb Purgatory:
ME [refusing]: Not for me. Not now.
CHUCK: No Red Birds? You don't wanna fly free?
Grant shouldered past me like the jock he once was, slapped a thin fold of movie theater cash on Chuck's bare knee, received a baggie with dozens of acid hits.
GRANT: He doesn't fly, he sleeps. [putting two on his tongue] See you on the other side, Goldman.
Everyone took Red Birds but me and Eddie, who had an upset stomach. I'd spent all afternoon in therapy dredging up landmines that somehow connected to the girl situation; I didn't trust what might come roaring out of me into my first-ever trip, one that Grant would be part of too. Eddie and I went back to my place, ripping bong hits on our pissy couch all night, watching old samurai films from the library.
++++
Grant came home after dawn singing songs of adventure and mystery. Things had gotten wilder after we left: Chuck's girl Jackie came by with a bunch of her horny friends, bringing orgy vibes with them, when the Coral Gables Police suddenly banged on the door with a noise complaint. But after that:
GRANT: Wild ideas were waiting in the dark. They come out when it's quiet.
Still tripping, Grant explained to me how it was all so clear to him now:
GRANT: American capitalism is a trap, a prison mind-state we spend our whole lives as prisoners inside of, from the cradle to the grave. Paychecks and credit cards and new stuff to buy and HOAs and health insurance and and and you don't even know its iron bars are there, locking you up... unless you're lucky enought to get out onto the other side of them! Which for me, was my first time in...
I rolled my eyes and said it along with him:
TOGETHER: Ethpaña.
He looked like I'd slapped his face, his ego:
GRANT [after a recovery beat]: I'm a joke to you? That's nice, friend.
In that moment, Grant knew he wanted, needed to escape again. But he didn't have enough money to break orbit. All he had was a minimum-wage job at a movie theater that kept our popcorn ceiling over his head, an unfinished novel and LOTS MORE ACID.
So he dropped another Red Bird and went to work.
His manager, an old Coconut Grove hippie named Bertram, clocked Grant's dilated pupils immediately. Instead of firing him on the spot, he saw his younger self reflected and gave him a second chance. Grant was taken off the schedule for a week to "dry out and get it together."
Grant thought this "free" pass out of spiritual jail was hilarious, as was the very concept of employment, of earning his share of the rent, paper bills that were just "bio-survival coupons" to pay for cigarettes and food and yes LSD. He said these were all just ideas a higher being could imagine in and out of existence. He'd told me later, these were the thoughts in his head as he walked back home in the noon sun and dropped two more Red Birds.
Every time his trip grew thin enough to perceive consensus reality again, Grant placed another paper square on his tongue, shrugging off the strychnine's sideways teeth-grinding as he stared into the yawning black hole that had opened in the living room wall, tears of ecstactic wonder running endlessly down his cheeks.
This was how I'd found him when I came home from a 16mm camera workshop: panting, wild, watching me come through the front door from behind the veil of another world:
GRANT: Aha! Prince Burrito Supreme returns!
ME: Haw haw. How're you doing today..?
GRANT [cackling]: Bertram tol' me to go home and dry out. [Betram voice] Y'ALL GOTTA DRY OUT GRANT AND GET YISSELF RIGHT WITH GAWD, he sez!
ME: Ahhh. You're... still in the middle of something. I brought us some dinner.
I held up a greasy paper bag from Wendy's. He sniffed at the air, folded up his arms and legs around himself and rolled flat onto his back, arms and legs splayed out, staring at our dirty popcorn ceiling:
GRANT: That shit... stinks. I'm not eating... pig food. [gasps] Oh, the structures... fractal and infinite...
I left him a small bag of french fries on the counter and took the rest of the pig food into my room, closed the door. I spent the rest of the night with headphones on, reading bound screenplays by Terry Gilliam from the film department's library. Through the door, I heard Grant muttering to himself, pacing the living room, his words modulating into a rhythmic chant, a stream too guttural to make sense of.
When I awoke in the morning, he wasn't home. His french fries untouched, cold. Two tallies were drawn large on the kitchen wall in black Sharpie, marks that weren't there the day before, signifying the beginning of something.
++++
Days later, Grant told me where he'd gone and what he'd been up to. He'd come home for a few minutes at a time to drop more Red Birds every morning, afternoon and evening before wandering back out into the streets like a cat, exploring Coral Gables and South Miami on foot, seeking something he could not yet name.
In the twilight, he made friends with a group of old alcoholic bikers I'd seen a million times behind the package store at Fox's Lounge: paranoid eyes peering out from tanned leather, faded homemade tattoos, black leather by vodka sweat, bodies asleep in asphalt puddles of their own piss. Grant said they'd pass around bottles and pipes, sing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, get into fistfights and fall asleep friends again in a pile. He knew their names, their life stories, scrawling notes into his second novel notebook.
After 7am, churches would open their doors and he'd wander inside for morning service. Raised in an Irish Catholic home, he was always fiercely agnostic, but the Red Birds let him ignore the pastors and inhabit the dust motes traveling between colored sunbeams that shone through stained glass while he harmonized with the lost souls in the room.
++++
We crossed paths a few times over the following days, each interaction a jarring reality-collision marked by a fresh Sharpie tally on our kitchen wall, chapter breaks from a book only one of us was reading.
On the morning of Day Four, I was home alone again, getting ready for classes. I dropped a Pop-Tart into our never-cleaned toaster, realized my shirt had hot sauce stains on it, went into my room to change. When I came back out to fetch my Pop-Tart, I startled: the room stank with the tang of sweat and garbage, and a strange figure slumped over our kitchen counter.
For moment I didn't recognize him, but it was Grant: gone from fair-skinned to sun-burnt to sun-browned, grown rail-thin after eating nothing for days but Red Birds and stolen grapefruits from a neighbor's tree.
ME: Morning.
He didn't look up. The Pop-Tart in the toaster began to smoke.
I tip-toed behind him into our kitchenette. Rounding his right shoulder, I saw both eyes were open, following me, unblinking like a infant. He'd shaved his head with a dull Bic razor, leaving tiny nicks that bled heavily, thin ruby rivers that ran down his face, turning it into war-paint. He smiled politely like Wal-Mart greeter to a faceless customer:
GRANT: Morning.
ME: How're you...?
GRANT: I'm wonderful. And... terrified.
I plucked the blackening Pop-Tart between my fingertips, fumbling as it burned my skin at every point of contact. I wrapped it in paper towel and folded it in half, breaking it open to reveal strawberry guts and the smell of red vines.
I blew on it while he watched me, intently. I motioned with a finger: to the Pop-Tart, to him, back to the Pop-Tart. He understood, shook his head, continued to watch me take a cautious bite of this processed food item.
ME [open mouth of molten corn syrup]: Why terrified?
GRANT: I've never felt this... alive and real and yet... I don't know how to come back. If I even can come back. Because, what is my life now? What was it ever? How am I supposed t-to... be in this world..?
His chin twitched as he spoke, his bottom lip started to quiver, eyes welled with tears he somehow slurped back up inside, his cheeks dry but eyes red and stinging.
The alarm on my digital watch beeped. Another intrusion of This World into His World, another wedge between us.
ME: Shit. I'm late for class.
He nodded, fished three Red Birds out of his baggie, stuck them on his tongue.
GRANT: Me too.
++++
Grant told me later that every day he'd marked on our kitchen wall brought him "deeper towards the core" until on the seventh morning he threw open my bedroom door without knocking and announced:
GRANT: I'm... free.
I saw a completely different person standing there: tall, thin, bald, unencumbered. Burnt clean, rebuilt anew. Clean white sheets warm from the dryer.
ME [not awake yet]: Free..? What does that mean?
GRANT: I'm free to return and live the rest of my life. I've outrun the shadow.
And he stood there, waiting for me to say anything about his momentous unknowable experience I had zero reference to relate to. I hadn't had my coffee yet. I was sweaty, sticky, needed to brush my teeth. And I consciously chose not to meet my friend in that moment.
ME [asshole]: Congrats..?
We stood on opposite sides of a canyon. Retracting his energy, Grant nodded slowly, went back to his room. By the time I left for "Film Theory & Practice", he'd gone back to work at the movie theater.
++++
He and I settled back into our friendship, shrunked by Red Birds until it didn't fit anymore: he'd wandered the wilderness, ascended his holy mountain, drank from a fountain of wisdom. He saw himself as evolved, elevated, a keeper of fire. And I was a lazy student, bloated with privilege, a refuser of truth.
We stayed twisted up together, pretending, for several months, until he stood before me in his mildewy gray towel.
++++
While taking his shower, between the falling drops of water, his heart whispered to him: enough of this man-baby's bullshit.
And while I lay on our pissy couch, listening to the shower in a stink of weed and rotting meat and unrequited crush, the Lithium in my brain sounded an alarm: he's going to hurt us.
When he came back into the living room, his next words were a knife:
GRANT: She came by the theater today.
My heart started to pound.
ME: T-to see a movie...?
A split second before we spoke, he flashed his teeth at me:
GRANT: The new David Lynch, LOST FREEWAY. [his mouth hooked into a sly smile] I gave her free popcorn.
ME: Did she ask about me?
His shoulders back. Relaxed, ready:
GRANT: She's worried about you. You went from meeting every day at the doughnut shop to like, poof! She doesn't understand what happened... if she did something to hurt you. She told me to tell you that she loves and misses you.
Hot air forced my mouth open, hissed out through my teeth. And the only son of a local politician smiled bright as he lined up the headshot:
GRANT: [glint of eye, sparkle of canine] As a friend.
The ceiling above me groaned and shuddered, unable to hold the catastrophic weight of my heart, begging to buckle and squash my body into bone shards and entrails.
Grant went to the cupboard like it was nothing, took out the last packet of saltines, crunched them one after the other. Violence can be so very tiny.
GRANT: I don't even know what you see in her, man. Don't you think she's kind of... mannish? Husky voice, that boy's haircut, that little mustache...?
She was gorgeous, elegant, perfect.
He looked at me, mouth full of saltines, crumbs on his lips:
GRANT [pointing a saltine at me, the couch]: You enjoy this.
ME: What?
GRANT: Being a boohoo walrus, it's your safe place, isn't it? You know exactly who shows up to hold your hand, tells you that you're wrong, that you're an amazing person--
He let go of the sleeve of remaining saltines and they fell to the kitchen counter, crackers breaking. He stepped closer. The stink of the towel filled my entire world.
GRANT: I've got a better idea, Daniel. Get your ass off this couch and go get what you want out of this life! Isn't your birthday next week? The Big Twenty-One? Let's go have a fuckin' adventure!
My mind went immediately to all the reasons why I could not, would not: my short film pitch, Grant's job, therapy appointments, plus I still wasn't over--
He grabbed my shoulder, strong fingers squeezing flabby muscle. Exposed, I stared out from this body I hated, disconnected. Lithium in my brain activated and spiked to defend me from my own emotions, cooling and numbing me. In an instant, I was drained, numb, wanted to go back to sleep. I tried to jerk out of his grip but he put both hands on me. With violence, I thrashed like a carp as he wrestled me off the couch to flop onto the floor. Pulling my knees to my chest for protection, he used a bare foot to flip me onto my back--
ME: Hey, w-wait! Stop--
--straddling me with his knees, his full weight pressing down onto my shoulders, pinning me to the floor.
ME: Grant, g-get the fuc--
Sitting back on his heels, I felt his balls pressing like boiled eggs against my sternum. My nostrils filled with that towel's stink as he leaned in close, near my throat, growling like Clint Eastwood:
GRANT: I'm going to ask you one question: do you want to die... or do you want to live?
I was instantly terrified: what if his acid-twaddled, son-of-a-schizo brain thought that helping a depressed person die was a benevolent kindness? Was he actually going to kill me?
ME [croaking]: l-live. i wanna live.
He looked down at me and laughed.
GRANT: Follow-up question: do you want to live like this? A medicated ghost of the person you know you're supposed to be? Or do you want to fuckin' break free of this heaviness?
His word choice was likely intentional. I certainly internalized it that way. The Lithium in my blood serenaded me to close my eyes, go to sleep, everything is already fine, but hot tears I couldn't stop began spilling down from the corners of my pulsing eyes, collecting in the wells of my ears. Whether Grant meant my body or my spirit, my answer to both was:
ME : y-yes.
He slapped me hard across my mouth, open palmed, leaving a sting that loosed more tears:
GRANT: I can't hear you, Daniel!
ME: yuh-YES! YES!
His knees bore down harder on the bones of my shoulders and I cried out. Grant grabbed my fat face in his hand and squished it, cheeks folding over my eyes, his ink-black eyes staring into mine, commanding universes I'd yet to see:
GRANT: YES WHAT, DANIEL?
Blood pulsed inside my neck and temples, I panted in pain and panic, dribbling from my nostrils and corners of my mouth:
ME: YES I WANNA BREAK FREE OF THIS HEAVINESS!!!
His knees straightened and he rose, releasing me, leaving me wet with mildew, my heart pounding in my throat. I did not want to go to sleep anymore. I was firmly on the other side of my protective chemical bubble and very much awake, electrically completely alive. Around me the afternoon sun beamed into our living room, warm and clear, released from the buzzing fluorescent static that had swallowed me for the last three years.
He lit a cigarette and watched me wobble to my feet, unsteady:
ME: Woah.
He went to his room, came back dressed in his high school Chess Team Champions t-shirt and football shorts.
GRANT: How do you feel now?
Wordless, I locked eyes with him and nodded. I felt... returned. I didn't know if this clarity would last or for how long. I didn't know if I was going to take my Lithium in the morning or ever again. Doctors had warned me about going off it cold turkey.
GRANT: Sorry for the– [He pantomimes the slap.] If I didn't give a shit...
ME: It... actually helped.
I picked the half-smoked roach from Denny's ashtray and lit it, inhaled and exhaled deeply, passed it to my friend.
ME: This adventure idea... what are you thinking?
End of Part One
