One Hitter - file under East LA / weed-punks on bmx

One Hitter

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Erin Earl Muehlenbach

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            Mario fished a bat of re-bar out of the scrap from behind my house and we rode off going all Ben-Hur down the alley until Joey bailed into a trash can. He sat up and brushed gravel out of the raspberry on his thigh.

            "Conquered!" Mario said, sliding in and spraying his brother with grit, "now feel the shame."

            "Faggot," Joey said, birding him as he got up.  

            We were behind the Kritch's house and over the wall pomegranates were big on their tree. I pointed them out and the brothers grinned wolfishly. Mario tossed his bike and walked over to the brick wall with the re-bar. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his face, then smashed a section of the Mexican barbed wire sticking up and threw his shirt over the stumps of broken glass.

            "Kim, you down?"

            I was small so they always elected me for gardening. I leaned my ride on the wall, stood on the seat and popped over, dropping into the yard fully stealth, except that my palm got nicked on the way over and started bleeding so I wiped it on my socks. Grasshopper was dozing in a chair inside the covered porch next to her moldy-ass pool. Her face looked like a rotting peach. I made a little crow call and started lobbing pomegranates over the wall and the brothers scraped around the alley to catch them. When I ran back the shirt was gone and I could hear Mario snickering from the other side.

            "Come on, bastard!" I hissed.

            "Hey, Kim," he whispered, "...fire in the hole!"

            Half a pom launched over my head, spinning out seeds into the pool, and smashed into the metal roof of the patio. Kritch snapped up in her chair wide awake, eyes locked on me all crazy like some fat banshee. I jumped straight up, then ran across the yard and hopped over the diving board with her croaking and trying to get up. We called Mrs. Kritch "Grasshopper" 'cause she got chemo and went bald like that kid on "Kung-Fu", but later we changed it to "Goat-Scrode" because some patchy grey hair grew in like a goat sack. None of us had never seen a goat sack I'm pretty sure, but it didn't matter. We were awful.

            There was a pallet leaned up against the garage and I scrambled up and onto the roof then swung off the rain-gutter into the alley. Joey had my bike there and we started bookin', laughing too hard to ride, but finally we made it to end, jumped the little ditch, and disappeared into the high grass of the field.

            We took weasel trail from the alley, then cut into the scrub just past where someone had dumped an old freezer. It had holes drilled in it so no dumb-ass kid would asphyxiate in there. The weeds choked up our cranks and we tossed our rides and lay down laughing, hidden in a little grass room the shape of our sprawl. It felt good to disappear. Once we we're in the weeds we we're gone. The field was our wilderness and we could lose anyone in it: narcs, rent-a-cops, the Water & Power guys, Ceph's drunk-ass dad; they could all suck it. I picked up a dirt clod and leaned against the freezer catching my breath.

            "Dickshit!" I chucked the clod at Mario. He spun over laughing and it thudded on his back.

            "Ha, ooh, Kim, you got moated man," Joey said.

            "Kritch was going to eat me you fuck-wads!"

            "Ah, come on. Grasshopper can barely walk." We passed around a pomegranate, and spit seeds at each other then froze 'cause we could hear someone coming down weasel trail. A Raiders hat bounced just above the grass and then Ceph walked by. I called out to her.

            "Ooh, Kim's gonna dip his wick in Patroki," Joey said. Mario coughed out some seeds.

            "Put your dick in her gyro!" he doubled over, drooling out goblets of pomegranate like a spaz. I shook my head and drew in the dirt with a stick.

            Ceph and I were the same age and the Caltano brothers liked to think we were gonna bone. Once she put on a nice dress and knocked on my door, asked my Dad if I was home. When I came out I went red and pushed her onto the lawn, not knowing what else to do, and she ran away crying. Her parents were drunks and slept until two on the weekends. Whenever Mario and Joey were staying at their Dad's in Simi we would hang. Ceph was pretty tom, so we would skate behind the 7-11, hang in the field, or play Atari at my house. I was still ten years away from boning anyone.

            Ceph's long black hair stuck out her hat in a thick braid. A few foxtails were poking out of it as she bounced up to us.

            "Get down," Joey hissed, "we just looted Grasshopper."

            "Cool," she said, dropping, "ooh, can I?" I handed her some, watched her lips go wet-red. A dust devil spun off on the big trail and we watched it until it went onto Sepulveda and got blasted by a semi. It was Indian summer and the Santa Ana's were blowing hot dust and trash so we had to squint and put our heads down when the wind kicked up. Dirt would usually rim our nose when we got home.

            "Hey Kim, you wanna go recon into the sketch?" Mario said. I shrugged, nodded.

            "Shit man, last time we went sketch Kim's ride got jacked from those hoods," Joey said.

            "Yeah, but I heard his dad showed up all 'roided," Mario said.

            "Yeah, but still."  

            A couple months before Joey and I had ridden into Sketchlands on a dare, to get some weird-ass rice candy from Chinaman Liquor. We only had my bike so Joey rode me on the bars. On the way back we stopped 'cause Joey had to hit his inhaler and these two hoods rushed us from either side of a parked van. I got clothes-lined solid and checked Joey's face with my ass on the way over. We landed in a heap and they took off hunched over my ride. Joey started wheezing but when we got up his inhaler was smashed and spraying foam. I ran to a booth and called home and ten minutes later Pop pulled up in the V-dub shaking a can of beer. He handed it to Joey and made him shot-gun it. Joey choked on it but it worked and he started breathing fine. Dad got out and pulled a five iron out of the trunk, forearms all ripped, and asked which way they went. He actually looked scary as shit. The hoods were long gone but Joey and I were stoked and went home and drew pictures of my dad all night. In one of mine he had a five iron raised in one hand and two severed heads in the other as beer frothed out of his mouth all mad dog.

            My Dad managed a copy shop in Tujunga and puttered around the garage on weekends. He said he was a pacifist, and it's true I'd never seen him raise his voice to anyone, but sometimes I thought it was a cop-out. He could sit for hours in a restaurant calmly waiting to be acknowledged, and he often let Mom be righteously mistaken with a shrug. Sometimes I wonder if I would have stood up for myself more if he had been a little more agro, maybe slapped me sometimes. Still, after that day I always felt some hidden physical power in him, sleeping deep down.

• • •

            Not much had changed; the towers painted, had rusted again; some new breed of delinquent had climbed up to the third tier and tagged a boner up there; but everything was really the same from the street. I parked near the old school, dragged the wheelbarrow from the bed of the truck, tossed in the shovel, pick-axe, and prospector case, and wheeled across the street. Nobody's gonna think twice about an old man dickin' around with a metal detector, I told myself one last time, and rolled off the cracked macadam, over a small berm of garbage choking the gutter, and into the scruff at the edge of the field. Broom-stiff grass stuck up from clay littered with plastic bags and candy wrappers, condoms, bottles of Old E and Mickey's. Overhead, transformers buzzed up in the towers like caged time machines. I pushed into the trail letting the wheelbarrow follow bike tracks rutted into the clay after the last rain, probably months before.

• • •

            "Don't do it man."

            "Don't try to talk him down, fag," Mario said.

             "Shit, Kim, you gotta have an opinion or something," Joey said, "don't just do any shit anybody tells you."

            Joey was always saying stuff like that. Remember that little guy from Midnight Cowboy? he'd say. Tryin' to walk here you dick-ass! And he'd make like he was banging on a taxi. And then he would talk about the one time he went to New York to visit his Uncle Lou in the Bronx.

            "Come on, Kim," Mario said, "we can see Omar at the sub-shop and get a nickel-bag, we'll play some Defender."

            "Yea, cool," I nodded.

            "Ah, man. I dig Defender," Joey said.

• • •

            I launched off some uprooted concrete and landed on a Fanta can with my back tire. It still had some juice in it and warm orange-fizz sprayed all up my leg. Mario laughed. He got a flat on our way back from the Sketch, so he was walking his bike on the sidewalk while I circled him. The Sketch, or Sketchlands, was anything beyond the northern border of the field, past San Fernando and into Pacoima proper, where we would ride until "¡Viva SF!" turned to "818P818" on the fences, and shit would get grim and hood, and we'd get spooked and book back to the field. But the carwash on Foothill Blvd. always had mass low-riders and if we had balls enough we'd watch them get shined for awhile and check out the set-ups.

            We were getting closer to home and I was stoked to tell Joey and Ceph about our ride and watch their faces while they ate the weird-ass china-candy and we told them about the tatted cholos and how we smoked weed with Omar. The field was just a few blocks ahead. It looked like a picture of old Europe or something. I got off and walked with Mario. We were just starting to relax when he bit his lip like he did sometimes.

            "What's up?"

            "Ah, nothing man, just Mike's house," he swung his head to where a garage door was open a couple houses up.

            "Shit," I said, "Pock?"

            "...mmhm."

            "Shit."

            Mike Pock was a year older than Mario and they had got high a few times together. He lived just into Sketchlands, a block from the field, and would sometimes creep around our hood trying to sell a nickel-bag smoking and being sketch. As the years went by rumors got darker about Mike. They mostly came from Omar, who was 19, and heard everything at the sub-shop. Mike had thrown a puppy off the viaduct and broken all its legs; Mike sold Reebo the shit acid that made him lose it and have to get institutionalized; Mike got a ten dollar blow-job from one of the skanky hoes on Glenoaks; Mike sniffed coke out of a skull ring on his middle finger; Mike's dad was a drunk one-legged vet who beat the crap out of him when he got home until one night Mike smashed a clock radio into his face while he slept and sent him to the hospital with a concussion; Mike was a bike thief and a pyro; Mike kept a sawed-off under his bed, a switch in his shorts.
            Mike was fuckin' bad news.

            I made up something to talk about while we walked on but Mario didn't play along, he just kept his head down and tried to be cool. When we passed the driveway I shot a look in the garage and got a chill. A shadow sat on a lawn chair with its long legs propped over a small bone-yard of motorcycle parts. The cherry of a cigarette rose up, and Mike's weasel face glowed red inside his greasy locks. I heard him snort a big loogie and swallow.

            "Hey fuckers."

            His voice was gluey. 
            We what up'd grimly and kept on.

            "Hey!"

            I looked at Mario.

            "Uh, I got a flat man. We got to get back," he said.

            "Fuck that back to mommy shit. Don't be pussies."

            I felt myself bristle at the word. I was always the smallest of the crew so I'd get called plenty of things, but everyone knew I'd jump into whatever. Last time someone called me a pussy, I picked up a brick all casual and threw it on the hood of that bastard Krystkowiak's rent-a-cop Nova parked near the school. Everybody shit themselves and ran and I just walked into the field and sat under the towers and smoked a clove.

            "Come the fuck on, fags. I got some purple hair shit. . . . Come on, pussies!"

            I nudged Mario and he followed me up the drive and into Mike's garage.

• • •

            On my first go with it, years ago, I caught a look at myself in the reflection of the sliding glass door as I left my apartment and had a flash of revulsion in realizing I'd become the caricature of a lonely old widower beach-combing for spare change. I could tell anyone curious that I was a geophysical prospector, and only be half lying, but I drove to the dunes at Leadbetter Point nonetheless steeped in self disgust. When I finally got out on the sand, though, and put on the headphones I found I reveled in the anonymity the ensemble afforded me. Even under the sun my true designs could remain entirely opaque within a shuffling cover of patheticism. In the get-up I was seen and forgotten at once, and so there was no need to cover my tracks. I began to collect what was lost and rusting in the sand.

            The next time out I went the full Magoo; blue blockers, khaki vest, sandals, sun-hat, cargo shorts. I got to going every weekend; dawn patrolling Oyster Beach and Golden Gardens to sift out patina coppers, keys fused together with growths of rust, earrings and broaches, fishing hooks. Back home I'd sun my cache of unearthed baubles on the cement deck of my porch and spend the afternoon watching the stories held in each escape into the light.

• • •

            Something hit my window. I lay in bed frozen, senses wide with that singular focus that only comes from being scared shitless by bumps in the night. The LED on my digital alarm read 12:16. The neighbors always left their security light on and its glow cast shadows from the holly tree outside on the blinds. The spiky shapes moved and a hand reached up and tapped the window. Half a face appeared and spoke through the screen.

            "Kim. It's Mike, man. Come here."

            After we got high in his garage Pock started lurking around the hood more often, mostly just smoking cigs and hockin' loogies, but sometimes he'd sit just outside of our circle and try to school us about cars or something. One day I rode out to meet Ceph at the Wa-Pow steps and he was there, inching his tire between her legs, leaning his neck in, arms hung over his bars. Ceph was backing away and she jumped up when she saw me. Mike had a one-hitter, shaped like a bullet, on a chain around his neck that he was always sucking on, so much his lip was stained in one spot. He spit it out towards me when I rode up and said he had shit to do. Ceph wouldn't say what he said really, only that he was trying to get her to steal some drink from her dad's stash.

            "Hey," I hissed. "Isn't it late?" Mike got caught in the hedge and broke a few branches to get unstuck.

            "Come on man," He waved me over. I got up, put on some shorts, and walked to the window.

            "Dude, mellow, you're gonna wake up my Dad."

            "Fuck that. Let's smoke one in the field. Your girlfriend's there now. Steph, or whatever."

            "She is? It's Ceph. We're just friends."

            "Yea, she's cool. Come on, she wants you to come."

            "Ceph's in the field?"

            "Yea, I jacked some of her Dad's rum and we're gonna play choke out."

            "Choke-what?"

            "You just take a swig and then I'll choke you 'till you pass out and you'll have a trip like you're on DMT, Steph already did it mass, so don't be a pussy."

            I got on my treds and climbed out the window.

            Mike walked ahead of me down the alley. It was dark but the night sky had a green glow from the streetlights lighting up the smog. He jumped the ditch and stood at the edge of the field. Come on, he made with his head, then his checkered flannel disappeared into the grass. I followed and a little ways down weasel trail saw him in our little clearing, sitting on the old freezer.

            "Where's Ceph?" I said.

            He lit a smoke, held it in.

            "She's cool."

            He knocked on the freezer.

            The field started to throb around me.

            "Don't stress man. You wanna fuck her?"                       

            A pit was opening outward from my chest. I shook my head no.

            "She called your name man."

            "What?"

            "Yeah, I wrecked her but she's cool. I'll show you. But don't look at her face or I'll do it again." He jumped off the freezer. He had tied it shut with some wire and he undid it from around the rusted latch and opened the door. I saw her knees. Then her face came up, puffy and wet, tape on her mouth, around her hair.

            "I told you don't fucking look at her!" Mike pushed me back.

            "C-c-come on, man."

            "W-w-what?! You wanna s-s-suck me too faggot?!" He tripped me to the ground, pressed his knees into my chest, and wrapped his hands full around my throat. Breath wheezed out of me. I panicked, struggled, but Mike was too heavy; I was blacking out.

            His teeth were deep in his hair, like bones in weeds. And now his smile stretched and my eyes rolled back and the stars above exploded without sound.

• • •

            You never tell me about your childhood.            

            Ah, we were just punks. Nothing good to tell really.

            I just want to know...about your days. About your friends. It's nice that you're so chill and quiet; it's one reason I fell for you– but it's a little weird too, Kim. I mean, you never tell me anything.

            I just don't want to bother you with it.

            But I want to know, if we're doing this, I need to know. How about before you met me? the rehab? the living in your car? When were you gonna tell me all that? It scares me sometimes, not knowing what you've done, or what you're up to. I had to learn about the fire at your work reading it in the paper two days later.

            O.k. . . . .o.k. . . . I'm sorry. Here. What do you want to know?

            Well, . . . mostly about the ones before me. Who was your first love? . . . Kim?

• • •

            Carousel horses whipped by my face, golden bridled on silver poles, lips drawn back over silver bits, toothy and hoofed, red, white, black, sunlight bouncing off them in dizzying streaks. There was the whine of metal pitching higher and higher and then everything burst white.

            The sickly night sky and stars were above again. Mike stood over me laughing thickly.

            "Shit. You were flopping around like a bitch." He sucked in snot and turned his head and spit into the freezer. I heard Ceph moan and tried to get up but Mike stepped on my neck. "Either of you say shit and I'll knife both you cunts." He stepped harder. I started to black out again but then he was walking off through the grass towards the sketch.

            I got up coughing, fell down again, finally got to her. Ceph was laying on the bottom crying, her hair soaked, duct tape crammed into her mouth, her arms taped behind her. I helped her out and took off the tape and she cried on the grass in long sobs with her face down in the dirt, getting it in her mouth and not caring. I had my hand on her hair but I didn't know what to do. We went to my house and no one woke up. Ceph crashed in my bed and I slept on the floor beneath her.

            At dawn I gave her a pair of my shorts and a shirt and we walked the long way, around the school, to her house. It was a Sunday and her parents would be blacked out all day.

• • •

            I only saw Ceph a few more times after that. We didn't talk. It was like we buried our tongues. That winter her parents broke up and she moved to Nevada with her mother and I spent days in my room drawing demons. Dad watched the news and didn't notice my mood. The Caltano brothers were starting to work more, mowing lawns and stuff, and we didn't hang out much. I saw Mike a few times from a distance but he never crossed the field again.

            The next few years I mostly kept my head down working a few lame jobs after school and on weekends. As soon as I graduated I bought a beater Honda civic and told Dad I was leaving for the northwest. He said it would be good for me to get out of the valley for a while and see stuff. My uncle lived in Tacoma and I worked construction with him for a summer, mostly roofing jobs. I'd finally bulked up a bit and could carry a hundred pounds of shingles up a ladder. The guys called me Forklift. On weekends we would fish in the Puget Sound drinking beer on Ron's skipper. Uncle Ron was a bachelor and seemed happy to have me around.

            Ron and I were just getting home one Sunday with a decent catch of sea-bass, mack, and halibut when the phone rang and uncle handed it to me.

            "Hey man, too long." It was Joey.

            "Yeah, how you been?"

            "Good, good, I'm alright. Got a job with the cable company in Van Nuys and I'm shacked up with this girl I met last year." They had an little apartment in Chatsworth and a dog. I asked about Mario.

            "He's still a punk-ass. Training to be an EMT. Wouldn't want my life in his hands but Dad's happy he's not flipping burgers anymore. But listen Kim, why I called is . . . have you heard about Ceph?"

            I hadn't.

• • •

            I remember pictures I had seen. Someone had found the sites of several dramatic WWI prints, had taken their own photos from the same angle and location, then superimposed the images on a computer. In the composites, a troop of ghost soldiers in black and white walked through a bright upscale neighborhood carrying an amputee; a young man lay crumpled in a cafe doorway, wide eyed with a black bullet wound in his forehead, as patrons in track suits stepped over him nonchalantly. I have the same sensation now, as if our younger selves are here in the grass, black eyed and sepia, armed with dirt clods, limping home war-torn.

            There's a rustle ahead and a stray cat pulls its head out of a plastic bag in the weeds. It drags out something and slinks away northward, then turns and falls into a hidden trail like a stone down a well.

           

• • •

             Ceph had hung herself in her mom's garage in Nevada. Her father had called the brothers that same night, still in shock. No one could get my uncle's number to let me know. The funeral was the coming weekend. We sat on the phone for awhile, just shaking our heads, and Joey said he was sorry, that he would see me if I could make it out to the service, and we hung up.

            Mindlessly I picked up my keys and left Uncle Ron in the kitchen to watch my beer go warm. I drove an hour into the Olympics, found a dirt service road and pulled off the gravel under a darkened canopy of cedars. I hadn't thought of Ceph for years. Now inside the tightened hood of my parka the horror of that night writhed from some recess in my mind and caught fire and demanded to be named. I stayed there all night burning it into my brain.

            The next day I told my uncle I had to go to a funeral and drove south. I stopped in Weed and slept for a couple hours and kept on. By dawn of the next day the stink of Bakersfield and Lodi were behind me and I was climbing the grapevine on I-5 flanked by walls of semis. At the summit I put the truck in neutral and coasted past Lake Castaic as smog rolled in on coastal winds to fill the valley below. I got a shake at Tommy's Burger in Saugus, hit a few rocks with my dad's five iron while the shadows lengthened and rolled down into the old neighborhood at dusk.

• • •

            I follow the cat down the ghost of weasel trail until it stops to hunch over its pickings. Beneath me, in a puddle skinned with chalk-dust is a face in the dun colored water. It's not the one I wore when I righted these things . . .

             

• • •

            Just passed the Water & Power on Sepulveda, across the street from Mike's old house, I pulled over and put on work gloves. Before leaving Washington two days earlier I had called Joey from a gas station saying I needed directions to the service and had asked about Pock.

            "That dick? I haven't seen him but Omar told me a while back he's still living in that same shitty house. His dad died and left it to him. Hope he chokes on his puke in there. Hey, Omar bought the sub-shop you know, . . ." That's great I told him. We could go have a sandwich, and yeah, it was fucked about Ceph, very fucked.

            I crossed the street. A Duster was rusting on blocks in the front yard with weeds growing through rips in the upholstery. I went to the front door, found it unlocked, was just easing it open when I heard a cough and an unmistakable sucking of mucous from around the side yard. I walked around a scrappy cedar hedge and looked over the fence. He was there, slumped in a beater couch against the side of the house with blue tarp strung above him into a makeshift patio. On a bucket nearby a hand radio played a football game tinnily.

            Pock tapped a cigarette into a can he held on his white paunch. Warm wind blew in offshore from the desert, flapping the tarp. Mike seemed to doze off. I opened the gate and stepped inside the yard.

• • •

            In the clearing (somehow still here) it plays again in snap-shots: his slack face, one-hitter in the flop of his neck, a slug's eye opening, wider, the shadow of the driver on the stucco wall, poised in a graceful backswing . . .

            The detector hums to life and a warm static washes my ears. I make slow arcs in the weeds nearby and the dirt speaks. First little murmurs from minerals and black sand, iron and zinc fused to pebbles, then the tic of a carpenters nail, the sharp sizzle of a bottle-cap just under the surface. I step into the weedy room and static rises in low oceanic drones from something large several feet down. I find its edges and draw an outline with my boot, then pass over the center of the coffin sized rectangle slowly. A faint hiss. Bending with a groan I dig in the hard clay and pull up the bullet on its chain, still smelling of resin.

            Deeper, still, the box with its claim, wired shut and drilled with holes so no dumb kid will asphyxiate in there.