What is it about? 
Author Jo Treggiari delves into a time during her teenaged years when she was dealing with drug addiction, changing friendships and a sudden desire for a different kind of life.

Scroll down past the reviews to read Love You Like Suicide in its entirety.

“In ‘Love You Like Suicide,’ Aaron hands the pen over to Jo Treggiari. Jo’s story is much darker and takes place in Oakland, more specifically, Ghost Town, an area where people walk around like the living dead. This is a story about heavy drug use and addiction. It is also about Jo’s friend, Holly, who she loves so much that it hurts. The ending is tragic, but the writing is beautiful and compelling.”

From the newspaper Slingshot #115 This refers to the Cometbus print edition of the novella. Cometbus #55.5

“Something that’s bugged me for a while with this current fixation the publishing field has with dystopias is how dystopias get glamorized. Sure, the world is pretty much in ruins, but, hey, isn’t it cool? Wouldn’t it be great to live after civilization has collapsed?

I honestly thought the whole dystopian trend was going to go away after a few years but it’s only getting stronger. (The same thing happened with vampires a while back. I thought that would fade away, too, and you can see how right I was. There’s a reason nobody comes to me looking for predictions on future trends in the field.)

But getting back to dystopias—I think this glamorization started with how street and punk culture has been depicted in genre fiction. The trouble is, with many of those books and stories, nothing convinces me that the author really understands what it would be like living on the street, or being a punk, or scrabbling to stay alive in a ruined world.

If they did, they wouldn’t romanticize it the way they do.

All those authors would do well to read this novella from Jo Treggiari (the author of Ashes, Ashes—yes, another dystopian novel, but I haven’t read it yet, so my jury’s out on it). Love You Like Suicide isn’t a piece of genre writing. Turns out it’s not even fiction. But it is one of the most raw, honestly told, harrowing things I’ve read in a long time.

Set in San Francisco’s punk scene in the 1980s, it tells the story of the author’s nihilistic life as an addict, living in squats, making art, all the while living and breathing music.

It’s not pretty. It’s not happy. The author herself isn’t sure why she’s part of that scene. She just knows she doesn’t fit anywhere else.

And that’s why she, and those like her, are there. They don’t fit anywhere. They’re wired differently—and that’s what so many of those other authors I mentioned above don’t get. They have the trappings in their writing, sometimes they even get a bit of the tone, but they don’t understand the raw pain that underlies being so disaffected.

Except it’s not only pain. There’s tenderness there as well. A desire to create…something. Of themselves, or maybe through some form of art. But the poverty, the drugs, the darkness, grinds them down until they walk around like junkie ghosts.

It’s a real-world dystopia and it’s not glamorous.

Love You Like Suicide is easily one of the best things I’ve read all year, and I hope to hell that Ashes, Ashes is even remotely as good.

Highly recommended.”

– Charles de Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine

“Issue 55.5 of Cometbus consists of Jo Treggiari’s Love You Like Suicide, which has previously appeared in a digital edition. It’s rough reading, focusing on a period of addiction, conflict, traffic accidents, and sudden intrusions of mortality — basically, the most deglamorized look at punk life one could imagine. It’s harrowing stuff, and it comes at the reader unrelentingly.” Vol.1 Brooklyn| The Zinophile

Quill & Quire’s KidLit Books of the Year 2014

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LOVE YOU LIKE SUICIDE

(Jo Treggiari 2013)

How should I write this?

In third person so it becomes just a story?

In second so that you can pretend you were there too?

In first, so that I can drown in a tidal wave of sorrow, sink under the weight of it, remember what it feels like to be utterly lost?

First person it is.

***

WE CROSS the street to the corner store. As soon as we walk in, we are under the spotlight of her yellow glare. Even after all this time, it still makes me jumpy. I try and watch her without letting on. Most of the time she is as immobile as a great brown toad but I know she sees me seeing her. She draws my eyes as surely as the buzzing flies are drawn to the scrolls of sticky yellow paper that hang from the ceiling like gruesome Xmas decorations.

Today she wears a turban in bright, floral cloth and a tight stretchy mustard dress. Her immense bosom overflows from it, jutting from her skinny-legged frame and overflowing onto the counter in front of her like a sleeping cat. The guys around here are mesmerized by the sheer tonnage of her boobs, but that’s not why all the white punks call her “Mama Jugs.” She earned that neighborhood nickname by being owner and booze nazi of Jugs Liquors.

It’s the only store of any kind for blocks around, sitting at the junction of San Pablo and Adeline, which separates the long, thin wedge of Emeryville from West Oakland. Our warehouse lies on the border between the two towns, and I like to joke that my bedroom loft is evenly divided. I can straddle Dogtown, so-called because of the packs of feral dogs that roam the streets (mostly trashed pitbulls or small ragged bait dogs that have escaped the fights somehow), and E-ville, aka Emeryville.

We hit the liquor store as soon as it opens at 8 a.m. for cheap beer and smokes. Mama Jugs sells single cigarettes for a dime, but you have to get in early or she’ll have nothing left but menthols. Holly and I like the malt liquor that only the winos drink. Mama Jugs used to give us credit when we first moved in, let us settle up at the end of the week, but she got stiffed too many times. Now her fingers tap the counter until we slap the money down and then she counts it with a grimace on her lips as if we’re trying to pull a scam.

She never cards us, though, not like the other slightly classier liquor store up towards Berkeley. I have a fake ID that says I’m Donna Flores from San Leandro, age thirty-six, but thankfully I’ve never had to use it. Up close Mama Jugs smells of pot resin and her tongue is furred with mucus. She smokes fat joints rolled in cigar leaves. Her broad, deep-brown face is constructed of wide, doughy planes and her pupils are pinpricks in the bilious yellows of her eyes.

There aren’t many white people around here, just us kids. Seventeen, eighteen years old and flushed with freedom, we don’t care about fitting or blending in. We all speak loudly without saying a word. We are a tribe with our dyed hair and rags and big boots and we think ourselves impervious to everything. The local folks must think we’re crazy or lazy or both.

This is an old black neighborhood going back for generations, founded on the shoulders of ship workers who came to work the Oakland docks. Miz Taylor, the old lady who lives over the fence in a tiny cottage, is one hundred years old and still has all her teeth. She proudly showed me the birthday card she received from President Reagan. On the other side of the chain-link, there’s Henry. He comes over sometimes with his guitar and harmonica and smokes coke on funnels of aluminum foil with my housemates. Afterwards he plays the blues, music so dirty, so painful it sounds like punk to me. I like him but I wouldn’t be surprised if he robbed us if he ever got the chance. He always has something shady going on. Once, it was a trunk full of cameras; another time, orange leather platform shoes.

I try to walk around without being noticed but I can’t help attracting attention with my pink mohawk, black clothes and steel toes, and often I’m with Holly and we’re both tall and arrogant. I struggle with wanting to observe from a distance and get in people’s faces. It’s an uneasy contradiction. Some days I feel as if I’m living under a magnifying glass with all my insides exposed.

The other girls in the punk scene drink sweet wine until they pass out on the street. For some reason this summer they’ve all taken to wearing short slips that show their tits and asses, with fishnet stockings and clunky, knee-high skinhead boots. They bum cigarettes from the vagrants outside the liquor store and get pissed off when the men call them cock-teases. No wonder the local pimp, Sweetmeat, actively tries to recruit us all. “Babycakes,” he says, like he wants to eat us up. He exudes the acrid fumes of port wine and whiskey and leers and stands too close. He buys us cigarettes, flanked all the while by one of his sullen, bruised hookers, who’s not so different from us, although she looks weary and grey.

We already have a ‘pimp,’ the older punk rocker who gave us free lines of meth until we were hooked and now keeps us short-leashed to him forever. He wants our devotion, not our bodies, and he has it. Since we started using regularly, Holly’s skin is almost translucent and all my zits have cleared. My hips make a cage for my flat belly, which I admire when I lie down, and my legs look five feet long. We line up rails on a broken piece of mirror and drink vodka and OJ to calm the racing of our hearts. We hang out all night on the warehouse roof where we can spit on the johns who, on their way home from work, pick up the tranny hustlers, pulling the car over for a quick blow job. Or we watch the college kids from Berkeley who come over to score weed and end up getting mugged. Up here in our castle in the sky.

***

ONCE, NOT LONG before the bad shit happened, Holly tossed a piece of masonry out her second-story bedroom window at Sweetmeat’s plush Cadillac parked on the road below and narrowly missed braining him. He chased us through the warren of winding, blind corridors until we lost him on top of the billboard scaffolding, which climbed high above the roof and extended over the freeway. She was always doing stupid things like that but she was everything to me.

Up on the narrow planks, which spanned the space between both sides of the billboard, we could look out over the mudflats or up San Pablo Avenue towards West Berkeley or down the other way to Dogtown. I felt free up on the walkway. We could feel the scaffolding shudder and sway as if we were sailing across the sky on a great, groaning ship, and the air seemed cleaner up there, away from the grimy streets, which were tacky under the soles of our boots.

Our warehouse was called New Method, because of the laundry it had once housed. The roof was still crowned with a large white and red-lettered plastic sign, though the company had gone out of business years before. New Method. New Meth. Pretty funny.

Sometimes we’d walk around the block past the chain-link lock-up for impounded cars, and I’d try and find a bit of nature—a live bug, a strip of grass free of cigarette butts. There weren’t even trees embedded in circles of concrete here. The only relief was the sky above the uneven sagging rooftops and the concrete jumble of connecting freeway overpasses and underpasses looming over it all like a giant jungle gym.

Frequently I’d find a discarded high-heeled pump or some other cheap plastic shoe, and a hank of thick wavy black hair. There was so much violence implied in these two things, especially paired as they often were. The hair was fake at least—a crappy weave torn loose during some sex act. But the shoes. How did she lose just the one shoe? I always wondered and it made me sadder than anything else.

***

BY BIKE is the safest way to navigate around the neighborhood, even though the two fat twin hookers down the block sometimes try to grab me off as I cruise by. They wear matching outfits of cut-out lycra that barely contain them. On a bike I can pretty much outrace anything or anyone—crackhead, hooker, cop, pimp, jock, dealer, thug, college boy. But not a pickup truck hurtling off the freeway ramp. Nope, not that.

***

IT’S SO QUIET I wonder if I’ve lost my hearing. When the cops show up I’m trying to jimmy my bike out from the hissing radiator of the truck, but I don’t recall getting to my feet. My stockings are ripped and I can feel a trickle of blood running down my left leg from my knee to my ankle. I think the back of my head is bleeding too but I can’t bring myself to touch it.

One of the cops leads me to the seat in the back of his squad car. “You hit the ground three times,” he says, muffled as if speaking through a scarf. His hand slowly describes three circles, and I follow the motion with my eyes, feeling dizzy and sick. “Head over heels. Coulda died. Shoulda been wearing a helmet.”

I had wondered how I ended up on my back about thirty feet down the road with my toes pointed towards the truck.

“The ambulance is on its way,” he says.

I also wonder if he should have moved me but my tongue is too thick in my mouth to make words, and my ears still feel as if they’re stuffed with cotton wool. An old black man sits in the back seat too. His pant leg is rolled up and he moans while massaging his knee. It takes me a while to realize this is the guy who ran the stop sign and plowed into the truck. I feel a spurt of anger that they put us together in the same car. He wails and cries about being hurt but I can’t see a scratch on him.

Outside, the Latino truck driver is repeating over and over again that it wasn’t his fault. No one has asked me how I’m feeling, which is sick to my stomach and as if all the tendons in my body have been stretched to ten times their normal length. The blood from the cut on my leg is pooling inside my boot. I leave a wet smear on the brown naugahyde seat and when I feel the back of my thigh where my thick, black tights have torn, my fingers come away red.

The paramedic has brawny arms covered in russet hair. I think he has a Scottish accent. There’s a lilt to his voice and he calls me lass. This calms me. He braces my neck, straps me onto a gurney, wraps my leg and tells me I have a slight head wound but no apparent concussion. He says I’m lucky.

“What’s your name? Where do you live? Phone number?”

For some reason all I can remember is the address of my work and my name.

And Alejo. I’m worried about him, about letting him down. This was the day I was going to tell him that we could be together after all. I think about his warm brown skin and beautiful face: short upper lip like a pillow and soft light eyes. He has a mouth I want to feed on. He tastes of burnt sugar.

I answer the paramedic. I also ask him not to take me to Eastmont Hospital, which is where they automatically go, especially if they think you don’t have health insurance. Eastmont is in East Oakland. I went there once after I knelt on an upholstery nail that had pushed out from the arm of a chair. I was so drunk I didn’t notice until I pulled away and the blood spurted like a broken fountain pen. I had to stick my little finger in the hole until it clotted, like that little Dutch boy with the dam. The waiting room at the hospital was full of bleeding people, mostly gunshot wounds and stabbings, some domestic violence. Patients writhed and moaned on gurneys lining the walls.

All the colors, white mostly and red, seemed like extra-vivid splashes. Like someone with a paint can had gone crazy in there. I remember a gangly teenager wrapped in a torn sheet, his arm savaged by a pitbull. It looked more like a shark attack. “Hit that damn dog with a shovel at least twenty times before it would stay down,” his mother said in an almost conversational tone. Another guy had his head turbaned in a blood-soaked towel. When he unwound it I saw a crown of glass shards embedded in his scalp and cheek.

“Kaiser Hospital, then?” the paramedic asks.

I nod and under the brace my neck screams as if the metal and straps are all that’s keeping my head attached.

Kaiser is close by, up the same street my work is on. I have no insurance but I don’t care. I can’t bear the thought of lying immobile for hours at Eastmont surrounded by death and dying. There’s death at Kaiser too but it’s behind the doors of private rooms, and they’re quicker with the painkillers.

I think of Alejo waiting for me to show up, believing I don’t love him after all.

I spend hours at Kaiser being wheeled from corridor to corridor. No one really tells me anything. Someone comes and asks me for my personal information. I can remember most details now, enough to satisfy them. A police officer takes a statement, tells me that what remains of my bike is at the fire station. A nurse manipulates my neck and arms and legs, cuts away my tights, dresses the long wounds, and dabs an antibacterial ointment on the back of my scalp.

Nothing is broken. I was boneless when I flew through the air like a big black bird and I feel boneless now. They give me two tablets of vicodin and a paper cup of lukewarm water and I stare at the fluorescent lights above my head. One flickers and eventually fizzles out. The long rod of glass is clouded and smudged with black.

They move me from the gurney to a wheelchair and an orderly waits while I fill a prescription for sixty vicodin and then again while I phone home (no answer) and then work. Mr. Harris, one of my record store customers, comes to get me in his old Cadillac. He is soft-spoken, well-dressed and paternal with a thin worm of a moustache. He hugs me and I sob quietly on the shoulder of his tweedy jacket. He smells of oranges.

I’m embarrassed when he insists on seeing me inside the front door of New Meth. It’s been hot and sunny recently so the mold and mushrooms have dried up, but still the place smells dank and the fiberboard walls are stained with the remains of black spores and water damage. No one has taken the trash out for weeks. Instead it’s heaped with the bikes under the stairs.

My boyfriend Billy Nitro isn’t home, though I don’t expect him to be. We argue all the time now—vicious physical fights. Lately he’s been crashing at the band’s rehearsal space. I try not to care but I still do a little bit. That old love needs to be carved out of me so that I can love Alejo completely.

When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They’re like turquoise gum drops, too large for his face and too pretty for his muscular vibe The only reason he doesn’t look like a tubercular English poet is because they’re offset by a square jaw, cleft chin.

Normally I don’t date guys in bands. They’re all cheaters, but I didn’t know that then. Billy seemed different, though in hindsight I remember that he always had a girl or two in tow. He could carry on a conversation without talking to my chest and he kissed slow, but that wasn’t what decided me. I made up my mind after I ended up crashing at his space in the warehouse. He fixed me up a bed on the floor, just a squashy pillow and a pile of moldy-smelling blankets, and then he told me bedtime stories until I fell asleep.

I glance up the stairs, listening for any sound of movement. There is nothing. Marek must have crashed. Lately he’s only up at night, when the sun can’t hurt his speed-sensitive eyes.

Mr. Harris gives me another careful hug. He would stay but I mumble something and push him out the door. My body feels as if it’s balanced on top of wooden legs. The room smells of unwashed laundry and stale air with rumpled sheets piled on the edge of the mattress where I left them. The phone sits close by on the floor. I’ve kept it next to the bed since the Holly argument, hoping she’ll call. She hasn’t and it’s been months. I hear that she’s been hanging out with Connie, but still I hope. In an ironic twist, Connie is the one my boyfriend is screwing on the side. Oh yeah, we are an incestuous bunch.

If Holly is hanging out with her, it’s a much bigger betrayal than what Billy is doing. Holly doesn’t usually like other girls, and she always said she hated Connie. It was always me and her, a tribe of two.

***

WE FIRST MET outside a punk show we were having at New Meth. People around town had buzzed about her for a couple of weeks at least. Oh, she’s so cool, so tall, she’s from somewhere down south, she wears leather gauntlets and rings with big chunky unpolished stones. Blah, blah, blah. Consequently, she was the last person I wanted to meet.

We were like two strange dogs approaching one another. Sideways. No eye contact. Lips slightly curled back over our teeth. I tracked her coming from across the street by the liquor store. Watched her loose-limbed gait as she walked in front of a car, ignored the honking horn and squeal of brakes with that perfect lack of concern I aspired to. I was leaning against the fence and as she got closer, I shifted my gaze to the ground as if there was something fascinating concealed among the butts and empty baggies.

She walked straight up to me. “Want a beer?” she said, pulling one from the bag she held under her jacket. I looked her in the face. She had round green eyes and a generous mouth, heavy straight brows, long nose, every feature large and strong. It shouldn’t have worked together but somehow it did, beautifully. Her hair was dark, buzzed short except for long bangs, and covered with a bandana. And she was wearing a beaten-up leather jacket just a little too big across the shoulders with no band names on it and no decoration save for a single row of metal studs along the bottom hem.

I reached my hand out and grabbed the beer. “Sure. Want a cigarette?”

After that day we were inseparable, but then she picked a fight over something stupid and I didn’t back down, didn’t apologize, didn’t show up on her doorstep, and now so much time has gone by, I think we’ll never fix it. It’s like losing a limb.

Only one thing could fill a hole that big.

Let me tell you about the thing I love second only to Holly. Seriously.

Peanut butter, glass, sour apple, ice, stink-finger. So many flavors and I’ve had them all over the last two years and never shared my wealth with anyone until Holly. That’s how much I loved her.

Let me tell you about my dealer Ted and Holly’s debut at the altar of speed.

Holly was hunched over the table, her mouth slightly open, green eyes glazed. I knew that expression well, had seen it reflected back at me when I leaned over my own mirror to cut lines. Ted tapped the razor across the glass surface of the table. Small shards of crystal shattered and spun, catching the light from partially blacked-out windows.

I drew my tongue over dry lips. Holly’s breath hitched. I was a total fiend, but pretended to be civilized, to be patient even though my gut was tied in knots and cramps ran up and down my calves. I leaned back, crossing my legs and admiring the thick soles of my new twenty-hole Doc Martens. I lit a cigarette. My hand didn’t even shake, although my whole body felt as if a current ran through it. It was almost orgasmic.

Holly motioned for a smoke without moving her gaze. It was the first time she’d been let in through the door instead of having to wait for me outside, and she didn’t know the ritual of it all. Didn’t know that Ted would drag this out until I was screaming inside, until the sores in my nose broke open and bled, they wanted the drug so bad.

I chewed the inside of my cheek and the flesh felt raw. I’d seen Ted change his mind before, close up shop, kick everybody out just because someone looked at him wrong or had an annoying twitch, and I wouldn’t risk that. I kicked Holly under the table, steel cap against fine shin bone, and her body barely jerked in response, she was so intent. Like a cat with a mouse.

My eyes drifted over the product on the table. It was glass—Ted’s own formula of crystal meth—brittle and sharp like tiny pronged daggers. He tweaked the recipe sometimes, added less of this pharmaceutical compound, more of that one. Each batch had its own nuances and flavors. He’d told me all the chemical formulas before but I couldn’t care less. It was the end product I was interested in.

He was talking now—base temperatures and molecular structure. I nodded. I was willing to listen to his ramblings just as long as he didn’t ask me to remember or contribute to the dialogue.

I’d been dropping by Ted’s for over a year, and before that he was the shadowy figure behind the slightly more expensive prices I had been paying to his Hell’s Angels dealers. First a flail-swinging biker guy who had been built like a brick wall and barely reached my shoulder. He’d ended up in a stand-off against a phalanx of FBI who’d eventually shothim after a few days’ siege. Then a dippy hippie chick who’d weighed less than ninety pounds and could snort more than anyone I’d ever met, without losing her vague and effete dreaminess. I’d been forced to listen to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane without throttling her. Finally I’d been okayed through some lengthy and convoluted system of vetting and allowed to buy directly from Ted—a connoisseur, a gourmand.

He pushed the mirror in Holly’s direction. “It doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t hurt,” she said, a massive smile curving her lips. A rail four inches long and as sinuous as an earthworm disappeared up her nose. I could see the tiny capillaries explode and flush at the edge of her eyeballs.

I took my turn. Glass wasn’t my favorite—it tore up my nose and had too much chemical tang. But I preferred it to his stink-finger variety, which smelled musty and sour like rotten cheese and was so wet it clumped in the straw. This went down easily, almost too smooth until it reached the membranes of the throat where the ammoniac punch was so pungent it made me gag.

It’s not like I ever turned it down. We’d take anything he had for us because he cooked it himself and he didn’t add the filler some of the trailer park chemists did, anything that was lying around, it seemed. I’d heard some of the kids in Hunter’s Point were using formaldehyde in all their drugs.

Ted’s shit was as pure poison as you could get. You only had to look at him. He was the Keith Richards of crank: 56, 57, with a craggy face like a sallow mudslide covered in six days of stubble, a mouthful of broken teeth, and doleful eyes. His hands were always grimy with engine oil, and his front door was barricaded with engine parts from motorcycles and tiny sports cars, all Italian models, nothing but.

To get in you had to call first, then hope that if Ted answered and said “Okay” in his low-key grumble, he’d still remember issuing the invitation twenty minutes later—the time it took to scamper across town to the industrial wasteland he called home. There was a heavy steel door bolted at the first floor level of the concrete tower he lived in, no intercom, and the only way to get in was to throw pebbles up against the third-floor window until he heard you and sent his wraith-like girlfriend down to unbolt the door. She never said a word, though her eyes always looked hungry, and he never spoke to her either, though he was almost garrulous with me. I wondered if she was afraid of annoying him, losing her connection. She just sat there, arms wrapped around her spidery legs, and sucked up whatever he occasionally tossed in her direction. Often I’d be there for hours, shooting the shit with him, before I realized she was one of the indistinct shadows in the corner wedged up against the columns of textbooks and manuals.

So we’d take whatever, the heavy chemical stuff, the wet stuff, a variety that had brown crystal clusters in it and a faint scent of peanuts, another that smelled sour like green apple bubblegum, and the cheesy one that dripped down your throat for hours after you snorted it. We accepted it all and we were grateful because it was the best.

***

I RUMMAGE in the top dresser drawer for my razor and straw, clumsy in my painfully disjointed body. Most of a bottle of Captain Morgan spiced rum sits on top so I grab that too. It’s hard getting onto the bed even though the mattress rests on a low platform on the floor. I half fall, bracing myself for the pain of impact, but once I’m horizontal it’s all right. The mattress is lumpy but soft, and I immediately swig straight from the bottle, letting the juniper-flavored alcohol wash over my tongue.

Then I take inventory: vicodin, a little booze, half a smushed pack of cigarettes, four grams of very glassy, dry speed, and an eighth of the stink-finger. I put everything within easy reach. I’m not sure how the speed will go down but I’m already feeling antsy from not having done any for over twelve hours. I snort up two clumpy lines, which arrow straight to my heart, then lie back feeling like my whole body is made up of wires and pain centers. Eventually the vicodin and the rum get together and I lapse into a foggy sleep.

I dream that my limbs are heavy, swollen, the flesh ballooning out until I cannot move, as if I’m bound in rubber bands and can barely breathe. It’s a recurring nightmare. Then I dream that Holly and I are bombing down the freeway in her old Dodge Dart. The windows are down and it’s a blazing hot day. We’re drunk on Bacardi 151 washed down with warm coke and I’m trying to cut lines on the worn cover of a hardcover book while she zigzags down the road, trying not to puke as the rum and coke works its way back up my throat, trying not to lose the speed. I wake up breathless and sweaty, in acute pain from head to toe, missing her so much and hating her at the same time for being a stubborn selfish bitch who can’t just pick up the phone and call me.

Getting to the bathroom is my biggest problem. I can totter to the sink but I can’t haul myself up high enough to perch on the edge and pee. I pee in cans and empty them when the smell grows too ripe. The concrete sink is filmy yellow around the plug hole and no amount of bleach will remove the stain now. Shitting means having to get up the stairs and over to the other side of the warehouse. The first time I try it takes an hour and I’m trembling and sweating by the end of it. I come back down the stairs on my butt like a toddler, and have to stop for multiple cigarettes until my hands and legs quit their shaking.

On other days I bump into Gunther: the tall, golden, German exchange student, an anomaly in this warehouse full of young punks and old drug addicts. He’s visiting for the summer and staying with Ruth, a quiet bespectacled art student who keeps to herself. Everyone wonders if they’re having sex, if he’s gay.

He sunbathes up on the tar paper roof, usually wearing tiny red Speedos. And he insists on carrying me up the stairs to the toilets. He smells of coconut oil and his shoulders are spotted with moles. His hair is so sun bronzed it’s almost green. I attempt not to look at the bulge in his swimming trunks but it’s right there, pressed against my thigh.

I try to shit as little as possible. Luckily, a bonus side effect of speed is constipation.

Marek brings me booze and cigarettes and sits on the edge of the mattress smoking his stinky roll-ups that always leave flakes of tobacco on his lips. We talk about death a lot. He thinks our old housemate Paul went to the desert to drop acid and die, and he’s probably right, but still I dream that Paul’s coming back any day now, his dyed black dreadlocks snaking around his face like he’s some kind of Greek god.

These are my days and they blend into each other. I try to stay in an altered state for as long as I can while my body mends itself. I sell Marek some of the stink-finger at a profit, so he can keep me in hard alcohol and cigarettes. He feeds me cereal and artificially flavored fruit juice. He brings me the small television from upstairs. After vicodin and more rum, it doesn’t matter what’s on. I can stare at the snowstorm when the channels have gone off-air for hours, until those dancing white dots have imprinted on my eyeballs and they’re all I see.

Eventually I make it upstairs to our kitchen. I eat a hot meal. I call into work. Kenny picks up. He’s one of the inventory workers, the guy who trained me on the receiving dock. Sometimes I ride with him in his Beamer when we have to pick up lunch or something. He slouches, the seat reclined almost all the way back, one arm dangling negligently out the window, the other resting on the steering wheel. He steers with two fingers. He’s got four huge speakers in the trunk and the souped-up stereo has the whole car vibrating and bouncing.

I’m the first and only woman to work in restocking and at the start the gangsta rap–loving guys from East Oakland couldn’t handle it. They looked at my mohawk and my chains, my leopard-spotted miniskirts and shit-kicking boots, and said, “Hell no.” But Kenny, who likes Rick James and Prince too, talked them round.

He’s large, with fat overlaying slabs of muscle, and meaty hands that can carry twenty cassette tapes at a time. In the heat of the summer, he wears cotton pajamas and handkerchiefs knotted around his close-shaved head. John, our boss, started calling him ‘the sheik’ and it stuck but I always call him by his real name.

Kenny doesn’t talk a whole lot but he sees everything and he can keep a secret. I tell him a little bit about my life sometimes and the rest he sniffs out like a German shepherd. Even he doesn’t know about the drug habit, though. Hasn’t noticed how many visits I pay to the bathroom, or the perpetual sniffles, or how I can stay up all night doing inventory and still be the first one there the next morning. Or how skinny I am becoming.

“You all right?” he asks. His deep voice is muffled as if he’s covering the receiver.

“Yeah. I’m not coming back for a couple more weeks, though.”

“I have to tell you something. It’s bad.”

“Oh yeah? Is John being an asshole?”

“Naw, no more than usual.” He pauses. “The day after you got hit by the truck, someone shot and killed Alejo.”

Execution-style: two bullets at close range to the back of the head. Only witness: his four-year-old nephew. There were whispers of mistaken identity. His older brother Eric, who helped him run the record shop, was rumored to have been involved with a gang leader’s wife.

There should be hot tears, like when my dog was hit by a car. I can feel them flooding into my pores, weighing me down, filling every inch of my body—which is so cold—but I can’t get them out. Instead, they solidify into crystals like knives, killing me slowly from the inside.

The thing that remains with me is that in the space of twenty-four hours, Alejo died and I lived.

***

I THINK I’VE always had it in mind to kill myself. Eight years old: in eastern Canada where we used to live, I buried myself in a snowdrift and went to sleep. Ten years old: I concocted a brew of water and oleander flowers picked from the bushes growing all around my nana’s house. It was so bitter I only managed a mouthful, which made me vomit for hours. Twelve years old: I sliced my wrists in the bathtub using my father’s old-fashioned razor. I wasn’t old enough to know I should be cutting along the length of the vein. Fifteen: I swallowed a bottle of aspirin and had to have my stomach pumped after my mom discovered me passed out on the bed. I’d been having such a lovely dream. My sixteenth birthday: I injected air into my arm using a hypodermic needle, but nothing happened, and later the same day to celebrate being one year older, I went on a drug binge that lasted a week.

But after Alejo’s murder I don’t try and kill myself. Instead I move out, dump Billy once and for all, and get my own apartment.

***

THE NEW APARTMENT is tiny. But it has hardwood floors and lots of shelves and Victorian-looking dark wood built-ins with latticed panes of glass. The bed tucks away during the day and rolls out on casters at night. I just love that.

I have hardly any furniture: a futon mattress, a trunk with all my record albums but no stereo, and a small coffee table. I’m used to eating standing up, anyway. The kitchen is small, with a sliver of counter-space, mini refrigerator and irregular walls that I hit my head on, but I’m on the third floor, up in the trees and level with the freeway to Berkeley and it’s familiar like home to hear the constant whisper of cars and feel the breeze that comes down from the hills. There’s a laundry room downstairs and a fenced backyard with straggly grass and concrete steps that smell of animal piss.

I bring my cats with me. There are four: Mama, Mars, Tuffy and Ralph. Two tabbies and two black. I tell the landlord that I only have two and count on not getting my deposit back. I also lie about my age and have Mr. Harris sign the reference letters.

The other tenants are a mix of students and artistic types. They all seem much older than me. Like they have purpose. They move in and move out regularly, leaving abandoned possessions in the dumpster outside or piled against the brick walls. I score a silky pink upholstered armchair that turns out to be infested with fleas, a small black and white television and the first three albums by NY punk pioneers, The Dictators.

The neighborhood is up and coming. There’s a liquor store around the corner, an Eritrean restaurant (run by the same family) that offers big plates of eggs and toast on Saturday mornings, along with spicy vegetarian stews and spongy pan breads, and an occult store where I pick up the Catholic candles I’m so fond of. I especially like Santa Barbara, who offers protection from the evil people who dwell in the shadows. I know a lot of those kinds of people.

The clerk is a surly man with a greasy ponytail, an array of silver rings on his thick fingers mostly incorporating a pentagram into the design, and a liking for really tight jeans. Jeans so tight he can’t sit down, so he just perches on the edge of his stool. I figure he’s into Crowley and sex-magic, like most warlocks trying to get laid. I know he belongs to OTO (the local witchy group) because my next-door neighbor, who goes by Lilith, told me that a lot of the members live in the building and the neighborhood. She’s sweet but kind of dumb, has wide-spaced brown eyes and jet black hair that appears to be natural. She always wears flowing red clothing and is usually clutching a chalice of doctored wine no matter what time of day it is. Recently the chalice was full of poppy flowers and some kind of black paste. She let me have a sip. There was a weird medicinal aftertaste that wouldn’t disappear until I had brushed my teeth three times. I sincerely hope she’s not screwing the old guy from the occult shop.

I don’t see anyone from New Method except for Marek. He comes over and we eat pizza and drink red wine, sitting on the floor. I give him a couple of quarter bags. It’s a new variety: icy, sharp, and it smells like rubbing alcohol. I don’t like it much.

Marek’s moved back to Hayward—a depressing collection of modular homes and strip malls—to live with his older brother. It’s pretty miserable and the state is threatening to cut his SSI checks, which he gets monthly ever since he proved he’s emotionally and psychologically incapable of holding down a job. Fucking Reagan.

“Have you seen her?” I ask Marek. ‘Her’ is always Holly. It hurts too much to say her name. I can’t believe that someone I saw every day for three years has vanished so completely from my life. Not only that but we don’t run into each other at shows, and none of the people we mutually know ever mention her. It’s as if she’s hiding from me.

He shakes his head.

***

HER BOYFRIEND SHAWN arrives on the front doorstep one sunny day soon after I move. I hear indecipherable shouting, then my name, and I heave up the window, lean out. He’s standing wild-eyed on the front step. I don’t want to buzz him up so I yell that I’m coming down.

It’s only been three weeks since my accident and my bones feel less battered but my legs are still black and purple from blood pooling under the skin. I’m wearing shorts, and when I get down all three flights of stairs and out the heavy front door, letting it latch behind me, Shawn stares at my injuries, his mouth working as if he doesn’t have enough saliva to form words. “I didn’t do that to you,” he says finally, his voice thick with phlegm.

He’s tweaking hard, I can tell. Paranoid and seeing webs of cause and effect everywhere, himself in the middle of them. Speed is a very selfish habit.

“What do you want?”

He mutters something dumb about wanting to see how I’m doing and then says, “It’s dry out there. You holding anything?”

I ignore the request. “How’s Holly?”

“We split up.” He’s hopping from foot to foot. His lips are chapped and it looks like he’s been picking at them. “Bitch.”

My hands curl into fists and I force them to relax. Shawn used to be a skinhead and just because he’s sporting a couple of inches of hair now, doesn’t mean he’s changed deep down. I’ve seen him and his boys jump a suburban weekend punk and grind the poor kid into the pavement.

“Try the Manor House,” I say. I don’t want to talk to him anymore.

The Manor House is the punk house across the street. It’s pretty much trashed now and flanked by apartment buildings on one side and the arch of the freeway on the other, but it was once a rich person’s home. It has a long ivy-covered porch and a big overgrown backyard with twenty-foot high persimmon trees that splatter soft fruit on the ground.

There are lots of these punk houses scattered around Oakland, vast brick Victorians with rotting foundations and moldy carpeting, their porches filled with empty beer cans. There’s always at least one party going on, kids skateboarding on homemade ramps or bands playing in the backyards and idiots drunk on Boone’s Farm strawberry wine. The Manor House punks are always holding, though they don’t use any of the dealers I know.

Sometimes I go over and watch bad sitcoms in their messy light-filled sitting room with its sloppy, sagging couches. If you look, there are cigarette burns like braille on everything.

***

I DIDN’T go back to work for a few weeks, long after my body has ceased its constant aching and creaking. Truth be told, I’ve been drunk for pretty much the whole time. It’s booze I’ve turned to rather than my trusty standby. I’m trying to fog my brain, not tweak it. Drugs make me think too much. I’m going for an enveloping stupor and most days I achieve it, but all good things come to an end.

I’ve been thinking about the random way things happen. How things change for no apparent reason. How everything is uncertain. The terrible weight of Billy gone. Holly as good as gone. Alejo dead. I’m alone for the first time in my life.

And for the first time I want some kind of a life.

I quit using speed. Easy to say, harder to do. Time blunts the stomach-twisting pain of getting clean, the memory of my hair falling out and my skin dulling, my teeth loose in my gums. The small wound in my nostril where I’d picked a raw scab and how long that took to heal. My fear that my septum was gnawed through by the drug, and the constant runny noses. The twitchiness, the nerves strung so tight I felt like screaming.

I flush my drugs and the plastic bags, pulling them from drawers, from inside rolled-up socks, taped underneath the mattress, inside the secret hidey-hole in the base of an Indonesian wooden cat, and the sugar can in the kitchen. I toss my razor, my mirror, my specially made straws—a length of Bic pen with the ink tube removed, heated with a pocket lighter and twirled until one end flared out like a trumpet—and I don’t even feel a flicker of regret. I do have countless dreams for months afterward that I’ve missed one of my hiding places and stumble across a monster bag filled with white crystals sparkling like new-laid snow, but none of these dreams comes true, so I’m not tested.

I think of my drug dealer Ted and his morose eyes, long lantern-jawed face and oil-stained fingers. Cutting him loose after all this time is almost harder than letting the drugs go. I had courted and nurtured him for years, and I’m surprised to find out he considered me a friend. Marek brings little notes from him, covered in careful lines of chemical formulas as if Ted is sending me love letters in code. Finally, after a week, he stops calling and leaving sad messages begging me to come back. Maybe he’s given up, or has misplaced my number in one of his piles of papers, or maybe the memory of me has slipped from his Swiss cheese brain.

I miss Holly. I drive by her new place, the blue house above the liquor store, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. I never do but there’s graffiti up around her neighborhood and I recognize her scrawl and her rage.

***

SOMETIMES I sit on the floor in front of my windows and watch the street below. Yesterday it was the scrappy kids from down the block who normally hang out in front of the liquor store and give me sideways glances and occasionally spit on the ground an inch from my boots. They were beating a dead possum with sticks, kicking at it with their Air Jordans. It was long dead, its body just a piece of twisted leather and its face frozen in that piteous perplexed expression that roadkill often wears. Teeth locked in a grimace.

Sometimes I open the windows in the kitchen and let the air billow around the room. I listen to the cars whizzing past and remember how she and I used to sit fifty feet up on the billboard with cherry bombs and bottle rockets. How we lit the fuses and aimed them out over the freeway half hoping and half fearing that we’d hit our targets, hear that gut-wrenching sound of metal impacting metal. Once, my rocket went through an open car window and another time Billy tossed one that hit my leg, leaving a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my calf.

Sometimes I watch the woman across the street. Her apartment windows look out onto mine. She never draws the curtains, although mine are often closed all day long. I’m always surprised at how people think they have privacy merely because they’re perched forty feet off the ground. When I walk on the street my eyes are either directed upwards or downwards. I used to bump into telephone poles and trees frequently as a kid. This always angered my father and he would haul me off and hit me across the head with his forearm, as if I’d embarrassed him. But nothing of interest to me happens at eye level. I love to watch the birds free-wheeling. I lean backwards until I feel the weight of the sky, heavy but comforting against my body like a good, thick blanket.

I spy on the woman not in a pervy way but because I find her fascinating. She practices a crazy kind of martial arts with a sword, and not some willowy fencing foil but a large sword with a wicked curved blade and a guard that extends over her wrist and arm. There’s no furniture that I can see in the room and she uses the entire floor, moving from one side to the other, changing direction suddenly, holding dancer-like poses for long seconds, swinging that big sword around in graceful arcs.

I’m watching her and wondering if I should take up karate or boxing, something where I could learn to hit hard without breaking my bones, when someone knocks on my door. No one ever knocks on my door. Marek always calls from the BART station down the street and we usually meet on the front steps or at the liquor store. I’m reluctant to answer but whoever it is pounds again, harder this time.

I look through the peephole. In the hallway is a young guy I don’t know with a wide blue mohawk like a deep shag rug. Next to him, a girl I don’t recognize at first, until with an intake of breath, which is so deep and so sharp that it hurts my chest, I realize it’s Holly.

I open the door and she folds herself into my arms. She’s shaved her head again, down to a quarter-inch of bleached blonde fuzz. Across the sharp ridges of skull above her temples the hair looks more like a shadow against the bone. Although she is my height, she tucks herself under my chin like a child, and lets me draw her to the futon. The guy hangs around the doorway looking uncomfortable.

“I asked where she wanted to go and she said here, to you,” he says.

“That’s Pete,” Holly whispers. He pulls a crumpled pack of smokes from his pocket, looks at me inquiringly, lights a match with a flick of his thumbnail, then moves out into the hallway.

“He’s nice,” she says.

She starts crying quietly.

I pat her, clumsily, stroking her hand. It’s cold and clenched in mine. She is painfully thin. Her shoulders rise in spiny peaks.

“Baby,” I murmur, “it’s going to be okay.” My fingers rub her like she’s a cat. Her skin is dry and yellowed, like old paper, and her nostrils look raw, but her eyes are the same—moss green and shiny as wet stones—and her quivery smile too, the way her lip hitches on one side on the snaggle-tooth at the left edge of her mouth.

She tells me that she’s been so depressed she borrowed a car the day before, drove it out to the Berkeley Marina, hooked up a rubber hose to the exhaust and left the motor running. Someone had called the cops and they’d taken her to the psychiatric hospital.

“Jimmy’s gonna kill me. I left his car out there.”

I make comforting noises. Mixed in with the horror of seeing how bad it has gotten, is joy. I am so happy to have her with me again. I feel the holes filling in.

“And they just let you go?”

“I told them I didn’t mean to do it.”

“What are you going to do now? You can stay with me.”

She shakes her head, reaches for my Marlboros on the coffee table, lights two and hands one to me as if it is a gift. She sucks hard on the cigarette. Her hand is still in mine. My fingers feel the knobs on her knuckles. Her hand is warmer now, the bluish tinge less pronounced.

I wait to hear what she will say.

“I have to get out of Oakland. Away from Shawn and Jimmy. My dealer, you know…” Her voice trails away and she takes another long drag. “I was thinking of going to stay with some old friends of my mom’s near Santa Cruz. Old hippies.”

She turns her head towards me, shifting so the bones of her spine ripple against my hand. I remember how after my abortion she’d stroked my back for hours and brought me socks for my freezing feet and a hot compress for my aching belly.

“I could come and visit you,” I say, wanting to comfort her in some way but not knowing how. I’m lacking the mother gene she has. Whatever it is that makes her adopt every stray cat in the neighborhood.

“Yes. Yes, you could.”

Pete pokes his head in. “Gotta go to work,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”

Holly stands up. “I need to get my stuff out before Shawn gets back. He’s been in Seattle visiting his mom.” She squeezes my hand and smiles again. I don’t want to let her hand go but I do.

“See you soon,” she says, and they leave.

I watch them out the window. Pete’s car is a beat-up Datsun in a virulent shade of green. Like the car I used to have before Billy smashed it up. Hell, maybe it’s the same car. The passenger side door is dented and jammed. He puts his shoulder against it, works the handle and then holds it open while Holly gets in. I hear a clicking as the engine turns over before it finally catches. Pete has to rev the accelerator for a good five minutes before pulling away from the curb.

The exhaust fumes hang in the air for a long time.

***

WE TOOK A TRIP together once. Before she got hooked and when I could still pretend I didn’t need it all the time.

It felt like an escape. We ‘borrowed’ Billy’s car, a mammoth light blue station wagon, which barrelled down the road at seventy miles per hour propelled by its own mass.

Even though the sky was inky black and a stiff wind blew we had all the windows down. I drove with my right hand wrapped in dirty Ace bandages. In the midst of a drunken fight with Billy after I’d found out that he was still banging Connie, I’d fallen into the tangle of bicycles under the stairs and Holly had fallen on top of me. I had two broken bones near the knuckles, weird bumps that twinged when I moved my hand.

Our friend Dolores hung out the window and whooped.

Marek had lent us a musty tent and two coolers all for the price of half a gram. We were on our way up the coast with no specific destination in mind but I liked the idea of the sea. I used to go out to the Cliff House in San Francisco whenever I needed some time to myself, even though it involved a confusing series of buses and a lot of walking at the end of it. I’d perch on the edge of the old stone wall just above the height of the salty whip of the spray and look down into the tumult of blue-green water and foam or watch the mewling gulls swoop low for scraps or the raccoons digging in the parking lot garbage cans or the gay men cruising the ruins of the old Sutro Baths.

We had twelve hits of acid with Tweety Bird printed on them, two cases of beer, some bananas and granola bars, and a good supply of Ted’s prime stuff. Also three mildewed sleeping bags and a blanket.

Halfway across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge the rain started pelting down. Dolores was soaked in seconds, her dark curls plastered against the strong bones of her skull. Holly took over the wheel because I couldn’t see a thing and the big car was fishtailing all over the road. She wasn’t scared of losing control, maybe because she was more used to driving, maybe because she had no fear, maybe because she was already drunk. I weighed another DUI for Holly against my anxiety and moved over on the seat to make room for her.

It was pitch black and there was fog behind the sheets of rain but somehow she found her way. I knew we were there—wherever there was—when I felt the tires sink into sand and the car came to a halt with a weird groaning sigh.

It was all impenetrable darkness and silence beyond the windows, except for an occasional soft thump of wind, which shook the car frame.

Dolores climbed into the front seat and wedged herself in between us. She held six beer bottles between her fingers like a barmaid. We drank with the sleeping bags tucked around our legs, watching lightning flash and disappear into the black, starless sky.

We crashed in the back of the station wagon and in the morning woke to the smell of overripe bananas and salt, and the sound of the surf crashing just over the dunes. The storm had blown out, leaving the sky a pale, pearly grey. It was almost unbearably hot in the car from the heat of our bodies.

It took two hours to get the damn tent up. By the end Dolores was stumbling around, tripping over the guy ropes and drunk off her ass. One side of the hexagonal tent hung limply and I was left holding an extra bamboo cane and some anchors, but it looked steady enough.

We dropped acid, washing the hits—two apiece—down with more lukewarm beer.

The beach was light brown, like raw sugar or unprocessed speed, strewn with huge pieces of driftwood. Sand-smoothed logs lay scattered around like dinosaur bones, gigantic fossilized femurs, or bleached and battered church pews. I suddenly understood how someone could believe in God if they were on acid and looking at this great cathedral of sky and sea.

I kicked off my Converse high-tops. Dolores had taken off her boots. We were both wearing cut-off jeans. I wore a tank top and she had on some kind of fishnet number over a dingy white bra. We ran down to the ocean and went in up to our knees. We felt the sand slough away at our feet and the head-spinning drag of the tide. Small polished stones rolled between our toes as another wave picked us up and dropped us gently down.

“Come on,” I shouted to Holly. She shook her head.

When the acid came on, it was in the best sense of the drug: slow and mellow without any of the strychnine kick. I felt warm in my skin.

Dolores splashed in the waves, spattered acid trails from the ends of her fingers. She had eyes like in those kitschy velvet paintings of children or like Disney animals—all iris and lashes. Her flesh was crème caramel. The water beaded on her smooth skin. I could see her huge aureoles like griddle cakes and her nipples poked through the fishnet.

“Shit, your nipples are big,” I said or maybe I just thought it. My brain jumped around like a frog. She started laughing so maybe I had said it out loud or maybe she could read my mind. She looked more like a fertility goddess made out of cocoa now. We splashed each other, bobbed around like corks. A whiskery seal with melted chocolate eyes swam with us. I wasn’t sure if it was really there or part of my trip. Last time we were up in Mono Lake, on hallucinogens, I talked for hours with a brontosaurus that turned out to be a stick poking out of the water.

“Come and swim with us,” I yelled back to shore.

“Where there are seals there are sharks,” Holly said. The acid didn’t seem to be affecting her the same way. She was huddled up on one of the logs with a blanket around her shoulders. Dolores and I didn’t feel the cold. The sea boiled and foamed and the smell was as fresh as lime juice, none of that sour, seaweedy tang.

We stumbled from the waves on unsteady legs. The suck, swallow, regurgitation of the sea was stronger, or I was weaker with my muscles drained away. I plopped down on the sand next to Holly, ran my fingers through the sand and admired the way it turned my hands into diamond-crusted gloves. I buried my feet in the warm sand and shivered with delight. My toes looked like cinnamon donut holes. Dolores skipped off down the beach, turning cartwheels and singing the Dead Kennedys at the top of her lungs.

I looked away from her and back to Holly. Her features were so still she wasn’t familiar to me. There were lines on her forehead and sloping down from the corners of her nose. I got a sudden image of how she would look when she was old.

“Hey,” I said to her, wanting to see expression, movement, “what’s going on with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing is going on. It’s a wasted life.” There was nothing light in her inflection, although this was an old joke of ours.

“Got drugs, got beer, got sun. What else is there?”

“Is that it?”

I thought of the holes that drugs didn’t quite fill anymore but I didn’t say anything to her because I wasn’t sure where she was going with it. My stuttering brain couldn’t follow her.

“Besides, you also have your paintings and your poetry,” she said.

“They’re pretty shitty.” I felt embarrassed. My paintings were brushed onto found wood and scraps of metal with house paint and melted wax, the colors subdued and dark. I’d been pretty drunk when I showed her my poetry, sentimental crap about death and silence and being lost. I could never find the right words. I could feel them burrowing into my organs like  bugs, but they hid from me.

“But you have them. To get the poisons out.”

She brushed her fingers against her chest. Sand rubbed off and glittered there like a gold collar around her neck.

“Well, you have stuff too.” The acid robbed words from my mouth. My voice echoed in my ears and the light kept splintering.

She shook her head, leaving trails in the air that dizzied me. “Just you.”

I wished I had more to give her.

Holly looked like she was carved from fine white wood. She watched the dunlins in their ivory and buff plumage as they twinkled over the sand in the wake of the waves, hunting for food. And I watched her, trying to find my friend in the statue she had become.

I have a photo of her from then—she was wearing a beret, a pair of cut-offs over long underwear. Her arms were clasped around her chest, knees tucked under her chin. Who knew what she was thinking about?

I asked her.

“I’m thinking what’s the point?” Holly said. She laughed a little but it sounded wrong, like canned laughter on a sitcom. “God, I’m such a stereotype.”

“Really?” I said. I was feeling exhilarated. I reminded her of the stash in the tent.

“Do a line?” I suggested. She shook her head.

“I’m tired. Bored. Empty.” Her palm pressed against her chest as if she was trying to feel her heartbeat. I noticed thin silver lines on her wrists, strands of a spider’s web. I’d never seen them before. How had I never seen them before?

“Um, yeah,” I said, feeling helpless. The words were stuck somewhere under my ribcage. Used to be we’d feel the same about everything but it crossed my mind that I didn’t get what she was talking about.

“My brain is mush,” I mumbled. “Wait until I come down.”

She smiled at me, her crooked, sweet, sad smile where it looked like her lip was snagged on her tooth. There was a wealth of something in her eyes that I could not identify. It was beyond the physical. It had nothing to do with time and place or us or pain or boredom or drugs or anything else I could understand.

***

YOU KNOW how sometimes you’ll catch sight of a number from the corner of your eye, like your birthdate on a digital clock or a license plate, or your grocery bill will add up to $6.66 or $13.33 or some other cool series of numbers? I always got a kick out of $6.66—it kind of underscored my belief that I was evil.

The alarm clock by the side of my bed reads 7:44 a.m. And afterwards I remember thinking, wow, 7:44 a.m. on July fourth, well I’m sure as hell never going to forget that. I am actually asleep when the phone rings. Okay, not exactly asleep, more like passed out. I’d felt really lonely the night before so I watched an old Katherine Hepburn movie and drank a bottle of wine by myself. I’m pretty groggy when I answer the phone and when I glance at the digital alarm clock and see that it isn’t even eight a.m. yet I am also kind of pissed off.

“What?” My voice has that gravelly before-the-first-cigarette-of-the-day quality.

I half expect a wrong number. No one I know gets up before noon unless they work, in which case they’d be on their way to their job and not calling me.

“Who the hell is this?” I rasp. I can hear breathing on the other end.

“Peter.”

“Peter who?”

“I came over with Holly that time…” His voice kind of makes a hitching sound. I hear the popping strike of a match and then he inhales and exhales deeply a few times as if he is sucking really hard on his cigarette. I lean up on my elbow, more awake now.

“The guy with the blue mohawk?” I remember the way he lit his match with his thumbnail.

“Yeah.”

I fumble a smoke out of the pack next to the bed.

“What?” I say again, but in a quieter voice.

“She’s gone.”

Immediately I know he means Holly. But what is he talking about?

“Gone where?” Christ, it’s like pulling teeth.

“Gone.”

And suddenly I know he means dead.

***

I GUESS she decided to do it that way because she was in an old A-frame house with exposed beams. Easy enough to sling a rope over one.

I lose my hearing for six months. Six months where I feel completely trapped in my own head. Years later I still won’t be able to say her name without my throat closing up as if a hand is gripping it or a rope is pulled tight around it, won’t be able say out loud, ‘She hung herself.’

***

I POUR a bag of cat food into my cats’ dishes, fill a big bowl of water and then close the kitchen door on them. I can’t stand the thought of anyone or anything touching me. I can’t go to work so I don’t go. I tell Kenny that something bad has happened and I don’t know when or if I’ll be back. He tells me not to sweat it. He asks me no questions. I don’t think I could force the words past the swelling in my throat anyway. Instead the words, all those words, like a storm, thunder inside my skull until I think I’ll go crazy.

I drink and I smoke but I don’t go out and score. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because I don’t have the hook-up anymore. Maybe it’s because speed sharpens everything, brings it into focus and makes you dwell on things. Tiny details, inconsequential events, stupid tedious projects—like when I covered the walls and the ceiling of a corner of my warehouse space with hundreds of sheets of tinfoil and then couldn’t remember why I’d thought it was such a cool idea.

I’m terrified that this, the fact that Holly is really and truly gone forever, would be magnified with drugs to such a degree that it would encompass everything. It would swallow me and the apartment whole.

This horror I feel. This sticky black web that chokes me and wraps itself around my head so that I’m suffocating, and even though I can still see out of my eyes, I feel like I’m trapped and nobody on the outside notices a goddamn thing. No one sees that everything has changed now, and nothing matters. Nothing.

And I obsess. I think about our last conversations. When she sounded so optimistic. When she talked about going back to school. When she talked about breaking up with Shawn for good. When we talked about me coming down to visit her soon and she laughed at the thought of me staying in a hippie house with her mother’s crazy deadhead friends, eating granola and working in the vegetable garden.

She wasn’t lying. I know it. I try to get into her head and figure out what changed. What made her phone Shawn and tell him to listen to her while she died?

Punks are unhappy and nihilistic and cynical and fucked-up and sometimes we are abused and sometimes we abuse others, but we rarely kill ourselves. Not outright. We do drugs and drink to excess and for me at least that was a slow form of suicide, but when you get right down to it, none of us really wants to die.

So Holly’s successful suicide is a first. We never knew if Paul had managed to pull off his desert death, since all the cops did was list him as a missing person, and after we all left New Method his parents had no way of reaching us. I prefer to believe that he just had enough of the bullshit and disappeared off the grid and he’s out there somewhere. Happy, even.

I can’t talk about it. I can’t talk about her but I need to be around people who knew her and remember us together. Part of the fear consuming me is the fear of forgetting. I need to remember everything about her. Everything she did, every expression, the things that only I knew about her and the things that others knew. Even those I need to steal and remake into my own memories so that then maybe it’ll feel like she didn’t die.

I go to punk parties and they seem really stupid to me. I sit and drink and stare at people with hate and contempt. Shawn, Marek, John, Dolores and even Billy stand nearby and keep everyone away. I overhear a girl talking about Holly and how sad she is now that she’s gone. I’ve never seen her before. Shawn has to restrain me from ripping her head from her shoulders. Mohawk Mica whispers in her ear, and the girl looks at me with her mouth open, and I can’t stand the pity in her eyes. People are whispering and it drives me crazy to think that Holly is gossip, that people who aren’t good enough to have her name in their mouths talk about her, that she has been reduced to a vicarious thrill. It makes me want to kill.

Instead I throw my bottle against the wall and let the glass hit me as it ricochets back. I want to be sliced to pieces but it just spatters against my skin. I pick up a piece and rip at my palm. This hardly makes a stir. I can still hear the words echoing in my ears.

They’re talking about what kind of a friend would let her best friend die, and what kind of a person could drink a twelve pack of malt liquor, call her ex-boyfriend, then climb on a chair with a rope around her neck and step off. How could she be so wasted but so cruelly methodical at the same time? I’d like to believe she died quickly but I know she thrashed and panicked and she died scared and alone.

I don’t ever hate her. I know she was desperate but I don’t know why she did this to me. Left me to face the rest of my life without her.

***

I LOVE Piedmont Cemetery. Holly used to tease me about how much time I spent there. I tried to take her once but she laughed and said I was too morbid hanging out with dead people.

It doesn’t seem that way to me, though. I call it the safest park in Oakland. No pushers, no winos, no hookers, no scary gangbangers. It’s empty of anyone and I can walk there from my apartment. Occasionally, I’ll catch a glimpse of a gardener tending a flower bed or hear the grumble of a truck, but mostly I have it all to myself: the winding paths, the views to the hills or the bay with the city wreathed in mist like some kind of fairy-tale kingdom. The rolling green—it’s so green up here it soothes my eyes.

There’s a gigantic granite monument I climb up the hill to reach, out of breath but I’m trying to quit smoking. And I sit up there and just gaze out, not focusing on anything, and sometimes, yes, I will have a quiet smoke because it’s the perfect place for it and sometimes I’ll have a little nip of whiskey. This is about the only place I can drink hard liquor. It just feels right after clambering up the steep steps. I’ve scratched our initials in the wall surrounding the plinth, using my penknife to etch the letters in over and over again as if we were lovers.

In the spring the algae that covers the pond is so thick it looks like an emerald carpet. There are painted turtles piggybacked on the old dock where they sunbathe. I come to the pond via the new part of the cemetery, past the mausoleums containing the bodies of Oakland’s first families, past the huge magnolia dropping its brown tissue paper blossoms, and through the overgrown section of woodland where smooth old tombstones lie tumbled like loose teeth. Cherubs are missing their heads, their arms.

Holly is not buried here. She was cremated, her ashes blown over the ocean far to the south by a bunch of hippies in white robes, but I need a place to visit her.

There’s a children’s cemetery with the plastic pinwheels, balloons and sodden teddy bears, and the Chinese section where they burn hell bank notes and incense for the protection of the soul. I find smoldering scraps of the fake bills with the suave picture of the Devil sometimes and keep them for luck. There’s my favorite wistful angel who sits with her wings curled behind her, head leaning on one hand. She looks like a real girl, like someone I could be friends with.

I adopt the gravesite and headstone of a kid who died two weeks before Holly. He was twenty years old, and his photograph is etched into the stone marker. He has laughing eyes, a mop of curls and a smiling mouth. Looks like a good guide for her. I figure she hadn’t meant to do it. I can’t believe that she would leave me on purpose. I think maybe this guy, who’d been killed in a hiking accident on Mount Fuji, will ease the way. Bring her to peace.

I have my favorite route. Up along the back path, behind the row of family tombs. We—Marek, Billy, this fanzine kid Rick from Sacramento and I—broke into one of them once. Not really broke in, since someone had been there before us and smashed the half-circle window at the top of the door. We climbed in using the doorknob to get a foot up and then jumped down to a dusty marble floor.

There were four coffins, big slabs of polished rock balanced on more rock, and others shelved in the walls like books. One had a glass top, smeared with dust. It was hard to see inside it and I was actually beginning to feel spooked but the boys teased me until I took a look.

The body inside had hair like matted wool and skin like leather. The flesh around the mouth had pulled back over the teeth, showing the incisors, and around the eye sockets and cheekbones the yellowed skin looked melted and waxy. I thought it was a woman. It was wearing a dress and had a delicate gold ring on one shrunken, black-nailed finger. Billy and Rick joked around, talked of stealing the ring, kidding me about vampires and zombies. They argued in loud voices and slapped each other on the arms as boys do when they’re nervous.

My flashlight beam bobbed around, picking out the years of dusty cobwebs, cigarette butts and some empty beer cans. When we finally climbed out, they tried to make me go last, even though I needed a boost up, there being no doorknob on the inside. For one heart-stopping moment I thought they would leave me trapped but Marek talked them out of it and laced his fingers together so I could make the jump up to the edge of the window.

***

I FIND I LIKE being alone. I come here a few times a week, follow the familiar paths. I enjoy the sameness of it, and how slowly my darkly clustered thoughts stop yammering at me. I begin to feel some sense of ownership almost, or maybe I start to feel as if I belong here.

My angel is always here, always looking off into the distance, the views not changing much from season to season. Spring and summer green mellow to russet and gold, fog rolls down from the Berkeley Hills, my turtles pile higgledy-piggledy by the pond. And there’s my hawk. For a few months I’ve seen the same red-tailed hawk flying ahead of me along the woodland path. It stays close by, twenty yards or so ahead, and at the risk of sounding like some zonked-out hippie, I am sure it is Holly. It is a certainty I feel in my gut or wherever such instinctual feelings dwell. I don’t try and rationalize it or understand it, I just know it, and it gives me back the connection I feared was broken forever.

I’m happy. I kiss my angel on her smooth cheek, run my fingers along her polished stone shoulders. My hawk travels with me on the long winding loop back down to the row of mausoleums I call Dead Man’s Curve. After that I lose sight of her, but I know she is somewhere close by, perched in one of the needle-straight pines.

I hear the growling before I see the dogs. Dogs aren’t allowed in the cemetery but I’d met plenty of dog walkers early in the morning so I don’t pay much attention. The low grumble continues, though, so I scan around and eventually find them—two muscular, short-haired dogs on the roof of one of the tombs.

They look like pitbulls but I figure they are tied up and their owner is nearby. I alter my course slightly, not wanting to piss them off any further, and cut across a lawn that takes me about thirty yards away from where they stand, motionless like gargoyles.

The moment I realize they aren’t tied up is the moment they begin to run towards me, mouths open, teeth bared, fur bristling along the ridges of their spines. I hear a shout from somewhere below me, hear the honking of a car horn. A man yells, “Don’t run! Don’t run!”

My legs feel frozen in place. I look behind me for a tree to climb. Nothing close enough, nothing higher than a gravestone nearby. No heavy sticks lie on the ground. I am weaponless and the dogs are covering ground frighteningly fast. To my right I can see a worker’s truck coming up the road but there is no quick and direct route to where I stand, almost fainting with fear.

The truck has to wind its way slowly towards me. I can still hear the man yelling, still hear the horn blaring, but all my attention is on the dogs, now close enough for me to see their yellow eyes, the black lips pulled back from sharp teeth, the fur so short it is almost like colored skin—one brindled, the other reddish gold—and the bundles of muscle propelling those compact bodies towards me.

They are coming at me at the same time, one slightly to the left, one slightly to the right, working as a team to bring me down. The horn blasts again but the man is still too far away. I see the dogs’ leg muscles bunch as they leap at my face, jaws agape, teeth like small ivory daggers. I swear I can feel hot breath and the lash of steaming saliva against my cheeks, and then I shut my eyes.

The tearing pain does not come. When I crack my eyes open again the dogs are past where I stand rooted, hands limp, completely defenseless. I didn’t even try to protect myself but for some reason they had changed direction in mid-air, landing to each side of me and continuing down the hill. When the truck gets to me, the driver is sweaty and pale. He pushes me into the passenger seat with shaking hands. “Goddamn killers. Someone just dumped them here,” he says.

He drives me down to the entrance gate. I wait in the truck while he goes into the office and calls animal control and the cops. Then he takes me a couple of blocks down Piedmont Avenue to where the coffee shops and boutiques begin and lets me out in front of the liquor store. I have just enough money on me for a small bottle of Jack.

“What’ll happen to the dogs?” I ask.

“They’ll probably shoot them,” he says.

“But they didn’t actually hurt me.”

“Dogs like that, no one wants them. Better they should die now than later.”

I stare at him and it’s as if Holly is suddenly there beside me. She would have risen to her full height, her eyes flashing like green fire, a crazy smile on her face and both middle fingers extended.

I straighten my back, square my shoulders, widen my stance. My lips curl away from my teeth, bared like the dogs’ were.

How should I end this?

Not with a whimper.