European_Son
Greenlighter
Hey everyone! First off, I'm new to this forum, so hi.
Anyway, this is just the first couple pages of my first story after two years of being unable to write anything. (Anything of value, anyway). However, I think I may be onto something here. The story will describe my first year of college, more or less a sequence of drug-addled vignettes with a kit that would make Thompson (and probably all of you guys
) jealous. It is untitled, but each "chapter" is named after whatever song comes up on shuffle whenever I start a new one. I really do appreciate all kinds of criticism, and if feedback is generally positive, I will post more of the story as I add to it. So, here we go...
My Son Cool
Everything was so perfect.
My relationship with Alexandra may have been rocky, but I took it all in stride. I wouldn’t be bothered by it. I wasn’t really bothered by anything, for that matter. My memories of that entire summer are such an embarrassingly optimistic series of vignettes, from receiving a blowjob from my girlfriend in the front seat of my own car in the school parking lot right after graduation to our group getting banned from the local Serenity Station open mic night due to our unorthodox and mildly obscene (not to mention profane) performances, that it feels like an out-of-place blur of happiness injected in between the awkward and confused blur that was middle and high school and the dark ages that took the form of my college years, and that’s not even getting into the bizarre and surreal world that my elementary school years inhabited and the somehow even more mysterious pre-education years, ending with the completion of pre-school and beginning with my earliest recollections of existence, involving a little toy banjo, a conversation with Santa Claus (who I’m pretty sure was my grandfather, but I’ve never asked for confirmation and my parents would probably not remember the incident even if I did), and a horrifying event which I learned only recently was sleep paralysis—I had woken up from dreamless sleep, essentially formless existence, to find myself staring into the corner of my room, unable to move or even make the faintest noise, positive I would die if I did, to see a man in a top hat, seemingly inflicted with polio based on the state of his arms and legs, sitting there, his face obscured by shadows even when he stood up and began to dance, almost playfully, but still quite sinisterly, toward me until I was finally able to scream and call my parents into the room, but even when they were present I could still see the man standing there, waiting for them to leave.
Even such disturbing memories, however, carried an air of harmlessness with them. My whole life may have been bizarre and even eerie at times, but I never felt to be in legitimate danger. Of course, college would soon introduce that (well, actually, learning to drive gave me my first taste of death, but the days of learning had long passed by the end of my senior year), but for the time being my life had been, only in retrospect unfortunately, a big, quirky adventure. And now this summer was my happily ever after, drawn out for a really fucking long time. But let me tell you, as soon as my parents left me alone on campus I felt the lights in my life dim. I was excited and looking forward to my time in college, to be sure, but it was exactly at that point that my life shifted. However, because of the excitement, I ignored the shift in lighting and went about the task of setting up my room. There were only a few things I was not able to bring from home, so for the most part I felt comfortable. I had everything almost organized by the time the Rolling Stones album I was listening to (Between the Buttons) finished, but not being one to work in a silent room, I played John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard, sure to give a fine first impression on Tyler, my assigned roommate, when he got here. I had left him a message saying that I would come help him carry his stuff up to the dorm (at least we were only second floor—I feel sorry for the poor fucks who have to climb up to the fourth floor), but I heard a knock at the door, as if he thought I may be trying to knock one out before he got there, so I got up and pulled it open and got a look at him for the first time.
He looked pretty young. He was as tall as me, maybe even a little taller, but had quite young features and was likely incapable of growing a beard. I stroked my own red beard for a second, a habit I use for filler when I’ve overused “um…” and “so…” and similar sentence enhancers. Upon shallow, solely-visual first impressions, he seemed like a pretty nice guy.
“Hey! What’s going on, man?” he said, giving a warm, genuine smile and swinging out his hand to shake. I took it and stepped aside to let him in.
“Not much, just getting my things set up. The place looks like a fucking prison cell.”
He laughed. “I know, man. I heard Rose Hall has the worst dorms of all the residence halls.”
“No shit, are you serious? Fuck, man. I know I saw the ones in Earp and Dearborn, they were nice. At least they were carpeted.”
“I hear people bitch about Towers all the time,” he said. “But I’m not sure why. That’s where we stopped on my tour before orientation, and the rooms didn’t look bad.”
I thought about when I went up for my tour. Tyler was from Pittsburgh, so he couldn’t relate to the fucking bright idea of having campus tours and orientation be separate ventures, but I, who had to make the six-and-a-half-hour trek across the state to Erie from shitty York, knew exactly how isolated the area was. According to more than one source of most likely reliability, Erie is the fourth biggest city in Pennsylvania (behind Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown). However, surrounding Erie is a dense layer of absolutely fucking nowhere, three small towns called Edinboro, Meadville, and Union City, and several smaller towns that even fewer people care about. So already, the location is a little out of place. It could be comparable to discovering El Dorado among the dense foliage of the rainforest, although Erie would be pretty underwhelming in comparison. The first sign of civilization I hit that wasn’t an interstate, gas station, or the large jungle of smoke-spewing factories and plants I had to traverse to get to the Erie area was Union City, the first few houses marking the outskirts of the small town appearing ordinary enough. However, in front of one of them was one of those cut-out silhouettes that tacky people like to put on their porches; this one happened to be waving. Even more upsetting, though, was the fact that somebody has taped a big yellow smiley face onto the head. I should have stopped the car, done a few breathing exercises, and turned around and headed home, heeding this obvious warning and getting the fuck out of there.
Unfortunately, my response was “Haha! What the fuck?” and I sped through the town until I arrived in Edinboro.
Tyler left to go get the last of his bags.
“You need any help?” I asked.
“Nah, it’s cool. I can carry the rest.”
After he was gone, I pulled by books and my DVD collection out of their respective boxes and set them aside to organize later. I dug out my incense burner and set it on my desk before pulling out the only box I hadn’t unpacked yet. I looked behind me to make sure that Tyler had shut the door behind him, which he had. After remaining silent for a second to hear if any footsteps were coming, I opened the box and pulled away the layer of papers that rested on top.
Inside the box were ten bars of Xanax, 200 milligrams of amphetamine, a bottle of caffeine pills, an ounce of blue lotus leaves, five sheets of LSD, a half ounce of medical-grade bud, three grams of hash oil, twenty-five Klonopin pills, a pack of clove cigarettes, an eight-ball of cocaine, fifteen Valium, a half gram of DMT, a hundred milligrams of Ritalin, two bottles of DXM, six grams of GHB, a bottle of ginseng root extract, 2 bags of heroin, ten extra-strength Vicodin, a gram of ketamine, five E pills (tested at 95% pure), fifty milligrams of meth, five packs of morning glory seeds, a half ounce of gold cap mushrooms, a small tank of nitrous oxide, ten morphine pills, two grams of 20x salvia extract, a hundred milligrams of oxycodone, four doses of mescaline, an ounce of tobacco and a cigarette rolling machine, fifty milligrams of Ambien, and a hundred milligrams each of 2C-B, 2C-E, and 2C-I. Also in the box were a fifth of gin, a fifth of vodka, and three forties of Colt 45. In addition (for which there was not enough room in the kit), I also had a gram of very potent opium my dealer had come across by pure chance at the last minute after his boss as the local McDonald’s offered him a line of smack off her desk (he apparently then proceeded to try and snort some off her tits, but ended up leaving a perfectly circular hickey right below her collarbone), a fifth of green dragon, a huge bottle of authentic Houston purple drank, four Red Bull (hey, caffeine is still a fucking drug), a batch of pot brownies, and two cans of beer.
“Hey man, I got a chocolate bar from the vending machine and two fell out, do you want—holy fucking shit! You gonna roll tonight?”
I jumped in my seat as I whirled around and saw him standing in the doorway carrying three bags and staring at me with amazement. It’s a miracle I didn’t spill the box everywhere.
“Fucking hell Tyler, you scared the shit out of me!” I said.
“I could say the same, dude.”
I paused. “Okay, look…” I had no idea what to do. “I’m not a dealer or anything—”
“Aw man, you had my hopes up,” he said, seeming genuinely disappointed.
“Well, what I was gonna say is that I brought all this to share with whoever wants to join me. I probably should have told this when I first talked to you, but I really fucking love drugs, man.”
“Shit dude, this makes everything so much easier.”
And with that statement, our year began.
Anyway, this is just the first couple pages of my first story after two years of being unable to write anything. (Anything of value, anyway). However, I think I may be onto something here. The story will describe my first year of college, more or less a sequence of drug-addled vignettes with a kit that would make Thompson (and probably all of you guys
) jealous. It is untitled, but each "chapter" is named after whatever song comes up on shuffle whenever I start a new one. I really do appreciate all kinds of criticism, and if feedback is generally positive, I will post more of the story as I add to it. So, here we go...My Son Cool
Everything was so perfect.
My relationship with Alexandra may have been rocky, but I took it all in stride. I wouldn’t be bothered by it. I wasn’t really bothered by anything, for that matter. My memories of that entire summer are such an embarrassingly optimistic series of vignettes, from receiving a blowjob from my girlfriend in the front seat of my own car in the school parking lot right after graduation to our group getting banned from the local Serenity Station open mic night due to our unorthodox and mildly obscene (not to mention profane) performances, that it feels like an out-of-place blur of happiness injected in between the awkward and confused blur that was middle and high school and the dark ages that took the form of my college years, and that’s not even getting into the bizarre and surreal world that my elementary school years inhabited and the somehow even more mysterious pre-education years, ending with the completion of pre-school and beginning with my earliest recollections of existence, involving a little toy banjo, a conversation with Santa Claus (who I’m pretty sure was my grandfather, but I’ve never asked for confirmation and my parents would probably not remember the incident even if I did), and a horrifying event which I learned only recently was sleep paralysis—I had woken up from dreamless sleep, essentially formless existence, to find myself staring into the corner of my room, unable to move or even make the faintest noise, positive I would die if I did, to see a man in a top hat, seemingly inflicted with polio based on the state of his arms and legs, sitting there, his face obscured by shadows even when he stood up and began to dance, almost playfully, but still quite sinisterly, toward me until I was finally able to scream and call my parents into the room, but even when they were present I could still see the man standing there, waiting for them to leave.
Even such disturbing memories, however, carried an air of harmlessness with them. My whole life may have been bizarre and even eerie at times, but I never felt to be in legitimate danger. Of course, college would soon introduce that (well, actually, learning to drive gave me my first taste of death, but the days of learning had long passed by the end of my senior year), but for the time being my life had been, only in retrospect unfortunately, a big, quirky adventure. And now this summer was my happily ever after, drawn out for a really fucking long time. But let me tell you, as soon as my parents left me alone on campus I felt the lights in my life dim. I was excited and looking forward to my time in college, to be sure, but it was exactly at that point that my life shifted. However, because of the excitement, I ignored the shift in lighting and went about the task of setting up my room. There were only a few things I was not able to bring from home, so for the most part I felt comfortable. I had everything almost organized by the time the Rolling Stones album I was listening to (Between the Buttons) finished, but not being one to work in a silent room, I played John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard, sure to give a fine first impression on Tyler, my assigned roommate, when he got here. I had left him a message saying that I would come help him carry his stuff up to the dorm (at least we were only second floor—I feel sorry for the poor fucks who have to climb up to the fourth floor), but I heard a knock at the door, as if he thought I may be trying to knock one out before he got there, so I got up and pulled it open and got a look at him for the first time.
He looked pretty young. He was as tall as me, maybe even a little taller, but had quite young features and was likely incapable of growing a beard. I stroked my own red beard for a second, a habit I use for filler when I’ve overused “um…” and “so…” and similar sentence enhancers. Upon shallow, solely-visual first impressions, he seemed like a pretty nice guy.
“Hey! What’s going on, man?” he said, giving a warm, genuine smile and swinging out his hand to shake. I took it and stepped aside to let him in.
“Not much, just getting my things set up. The place looks like a fucking prison cell.”
He laughed. “I know, man. I heard Rose Hall has the worst dorms of all the residence halls.”
“No shit, are you serious? Fuck, man. I know I saw the ones in Earp and Dearborn, they were nice. At least they were carpeted.”
“I hear people bitch about Towers all the time,” he said. “But I’m not sure why. That’s where we stopped on my tour before orientation, and the rooms didn’t look bad.”
I thought about when I went up for my tour. Tyler was from Pittsburgh, so he couldn’t relate to the fucking bright idea of having campus tours and orientation be separate ventures, but I, who had to make the six-and-a-half-hour trek across the state to Erie from shitty York, knew exactly how isolated the area was. According to more than one source of most likely reliability, Erie is the fourth biggest city in Pennsylvania (behind Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown). However, surrounding Erie is a dense layer of absolutely fucking nowhere, three small towns called Edinboro, Meadville, and Union City, and several smaller towns that even fewer people care about. So already, the location is a little out of place. It could be comparable to discovering El Dorado among the dense foliage of the rainforest, although Erie would be pretty underwhelming in comparison. The first sign of civilization I hit that wasn’t an interstate, gas station, or the large jungle of smoke-spewing factories and plants I had to traverse to get to the Erie area was Union City, the first few houses marking the outskirts of the small town appearing ordinary enough. However, in front of one of them was one of those cut-out silhouettes that tacky people like to put on their porches; this one happened to be waving. Even more upsetting, though, was the fact that somebody has taped a big yellow smiley face onto the head. I should have stopped the car, done a few breathing exercises, and turned around and headed home, heeding this obvious warning and getting the fuck out of there.
Unfortunately, my response was “Haha! What the fuck?” and I sped through the town until I arrived in Edinboro.
Tyler left to go get the last of his bags.
“You need any help?” I asked.
“Nah, it’s cool. I can carry the rest.”
After he was gone, I pulled by books and my DVD collection out of their respective boxes and set them aside to organize later. I dug out my incense burner and set it on my desk before pulling out the only box I hadn’t unpacked yet. I looked behind me to make sure that Tyler had shut the door behind him, which he had. After remaining silent for a second to hear if any footsteps were coming, I opened the box and pulled away the layer of papers that rested on top.
Inside the box were ten bars of Xanax, 200 milligrams of amphetamine, a bottle of caffeine pills, an ounce of blue lotus leaves, five sheets of LSD, a half ounce of medical-grade bud, three grams of hash oil, twenty-five Klonopin pills, a pack of clove cigarettes, an eight-ball of cocaine, fifteen Valium, a half gram of DMT, a hundred milligrams of Ritalin, two bottles of DXM, six grams of GHB, a bottle of ginseng root extract, 2 bags of heroin, ten extra-strength Vicodin, a gram of ketamine, five E pills (tested at 95% pure), fifty milligrams of meth, five packs of morning glory seeds, a half ounce of gold cap mushrooms, a small tank of nitrous oxide, ten morphine pills, two grams of 20x salvia extract, a hundred milligrams of oxycodone, four doses of mescaline, an ounce of tobacco and a cigarette rolling machine, fifty milligrams of Ambien, and a hundred milligrams each of 2C-B, 2C-E, and 2C-I. Also in the box were a fifth of gin, a fifth of vodka, and three forties of Colt 45. In addition (for which there was not enough room in the kit), I also had a gram of very potent opium my dealer had come across by pure chance at the last minute after his boss as the local McDonald’s offered him a line of smack off her desk (he apparently then proceeded to try and snort some off her tits, but ended up leaving a perfectly circular hickey right below her collarbone), a fifth of green dragon, a huge bottle of authentic Houston purple drank, four Red Bull (hey, caffeine is still a fucking drug), a batch of pot brownies, and two cans of beer.
“Hey man, I got a chocolate bar from the vending machine and two fell out, do you want—holy fucking shit! You gonna roll tonight?”
I jumped in my seat as I whirled around and saw him standing in the doorway carrying three bags and staring at me with amazement. It’s a miracle I didn’t spill the box everywhere.
“Fucking hell Tyler, you scared the shit out of me!” I said.
“I could say the same, dude.”
I paused. “Okay, look…” I had no idea what to do. “I’m not a dealer or anything—”
“Aw man, you had my hopes up,” he said, seeming genuinely disappointed.
“Well, what I was gonna say is that I brought all this to share with whoever wants to join me. I probably should have told this when I first talked to you, but I really fucking love drugs, man.”
“Shit dude, this makes everything so much easier.”
And with that statement, our year began.
