American Apocalypse (2 page)

Also there are the “Tree People.” They are generally okay. The ones who aren’t, well, you hear about them soon enough. The Tree People live in the woods, mostly in shanties they built themselves. They love plastic: Showing up with a blue tarp for trade sets off group orgasms. They generally survive off of government paychecks, theft, and charging tolls for the use of bike trails that run through “their” woods. Lately, they’ve started asking for water for the toll; one eight-ounce plastic bottle will get you through.

I go around them. Like I said, water is a pain in the ass.

We also have “Squats”—the squatters. Some of them like abandoned housing developments; others go for the commercial real estate, especially the bigger office buildings. They are a lot like the Tree People except that their roofs don’t leak as much. When I first started out I would always hear stories about them blowing themselves up or being found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Some people have to learn the hard way not to build a wood fire in a gas fireplace without making sure the gas is really off. The rest of the denizens of my magic kingdom are either insane, stone-cold druggies, or alkies. A few are all of the above.

Then you have the random predators—random only in the sense that they show up in your life especially when it will make a bad day worse or when you have something they want.

Some of them want whatever you have; others, all they want is your youth. They are vampires preying on the poor, the defenseless, and the drug addled. They want to drain their quarry of any innocence they still have after descending this far down. The kids—the prized prey—usually have some of that special quality left, which is surprising, as they have followed mom as she bounced from one bad decision to another. Usually, they never make it as far down as the Tree People. Most often they stop somewhere around the Car People level. That’s not so bad; at least the Car People try to look after their own—especially at night. Plus, “Baby Moms” will get something from the county and maybe a little from the state. The problem for them is getting into the system. For that, you have to have remnants of an earlier and luckier life. The system wants a checking or savings account to deposit the benefits to and an address so it can come and check on the kids—kind of hard to do when the drop to the bottom has been so fast and ugly. Some of the shared addresses have twenty or more moms listed.

Then you have “Drug Mom.” She blends in because this is where Drug Mom was destined to end up. Some of her kind were already here before us. Sometimes, I think Drug Moms just have the kids so they can make money off of them both ways: government money and predator money. Lucky Drug Mom kids end up in the clans that will protect them; unlucky Drug Mom kids disappear. Some clans actively recruit the kids, partly because a lot
of them understand from experience what a bitch life can be when you have a Drug Mom, partly because the little ones can be more vicious than you would ever want to believe.

I may have come across so far as a person who is somewhat decent. I agree, although others may not. You see, I hate these predators. When I find one—sometimes him, sometimes her, less often him and her—I kill them. Usually painfully. They have always been with us; they never go away. It gives a purpose to my life . . . I like purpose.

I sat there on my milk crate watching what passed for traffic nowadays go by, waiting, for The Woman. That’s how I thought of her in my head—always in capital letters, each letter edged with a faint glow of white light. At other times it was her name: Carol. She was one of the few people from before the Crash that I knew and liked. She knew me by, and actually used, my birth name rather than my street name. She was the only person left in my life that I allowed to do that. As far as I was concerned, the person who had worn that name died a long time ago, except to her.

We had gone to high school together. It really didn’t seem all that long ago, yet it was. Time may have passed but she was still the same beauty I had seen standing in the door by the cafeteria so long ago. I had loved her from afar ever since I was a freshman—afar, because we did not travel in the same circles. She was smart and funny and actually attended classes; I was one of those guys on the edge. We were there one day, gone the next, our absence
passing unnoticed except to the handful of others who were just like us.

Occasionally we would run into each other. Sometimes we talked, usually at parties, where she would be inside and I would spend most of my time outside—unless I knew she was there. Then I had to go inside, just to see her. We would go outside and get high and drink a few beers. Well, she would drink a few and I would drink a lot. Then she would leave the party and I would let her go. Given a choice then, I always went for getting numb. To be honest, I knew I wasn’t what she needed or deserved. My life was about one thing: getting high.

I had loved her. It didn’t amount to anything then, and it wouldn’t amount to anything now. Yet she was a memory I clung to during the dark days that followed. I knew she had liked me. The idea that someone that good, that beautiful, had once liked me gave me hope that perhaps someday it might happen again.

I had moved to a lot of places after that brief year that I had known her. I asked about her when I was able to make my way back to the area, but the chaos that was my life kept dragging me down streets that I did not want her to know about. I did find out that she had stayed here, gone to college, and had gotten married. Her current life was as alien to me as mine would be to her. Sometimes, I thought, the only thing we had in common was the same language and a few faded memories—memories that I clung to. I had not been making any good ones lately that I could replace them with. That was for sure.

While I waited for her arrival I kept an eye on a group hanging around and occasionally slipping into an abandoned 7-11 about a half block away. They would have
been there whether or not there had been a Crash. If there hadn’t been a 7-11 to stand in front of, one would have magically appeared. A 7-11 and these guys went together like a born-again and intolerance.

This group in particular always made me feel better about life, because one of them was a mortgage broker from my old company—one of the clueless idiots who had everything until he woke up one day and no longer did. He didn’t recognize me then, and he doesn’t recognize me now, but I had happily watched him from the first day of his arrival. I asked around about him after I spotted him standing there. He didn’t go directly to the corner. Very few did. He had been one of the Car People for a while until he had pissed off the wrong person, probably from boring everyone about how he once been somebody. Maybe he couldn’t let go of the fact he was no one now and still expected to be treated like he was someone important. That has a tendency to grate on people, especially as most of the Car People had also once been someone, somewhere else. One day he found that he had no car, just some metal and broken glass. He was lucky they hadn’t torched it with him in it. After that he showed up wheeling a grocery cart, the poor man’s Cadillac of the streets, and wearing a suit—a nice suit at that.

His cart was loaded up enough; that was for sure. He must have had other clothes to wear, but he never changed. Instead, the suit just got dirtier. Then the metamorphosis began, only in reverse: from butterfly to chrysalis. He started to mend his suit with silver duct tape. That was when he made his move to his current location. The duct tape was beginning to take over now, and I gave him another six months before it was more duct tape than
cloth. He had always been an asshole: Now he was a crazy asshole. It was also a bitter reminder of what awaited me should I give up. I might not weave myself a chrysalis, but I knew I would at least end up in a burial shroud.

Carol didn’t show up. She probably was not going to either. Punctuality was not as important anymore for a lot of people—too many things to go wrong. For her, it could have been a roadblock or car trouble. For me, well, I didn’t own a watch, but I was pretty sure it was a Tuesday.

One of the hardest changes to adjust to is the sudden amount of extra time you have, once you fall out of society. You have huge blocks of time to spend doing nothing, or you now spend huge blocks of time doing the simplest things. Some people had real problems with it. I had grown to like it. Getting to where I am now in life was only difficult emotionally. The actual sequence of events was like an effortless bad dream. Even now, when I look back on it, it retains a sense of unreality. One month, all was well. Then three months and a week or so later, I’m wheeling my bike into the woods to spend the night. You may laugh, but the only weapon I had to take into those woods was a used garden trowel. It had a nice point and the handle fit my hand nicely. Defense against what I was not sure; I just knew that there had to be something bad waiting in the woods. Back then the woods were not my friend.

Getting fired had been a shock:
Not me!
Why
me
? I am a good worker bee. Well, they told me, it was
not personal.
They would
love
to have me stay . . .
blah, blah
. They called us into the office one at a time. Our manager and some fat lady from Human Resources broke the news to me. It was not hard to figure out what was happening.
We all sat around in our cubes and pretended that it was no big deal if it was to happen to us. I think most of us actually believed that, too. I know I figured that I would take a week off, sleep late, and then go find a job: no big deal. My girlfriend, Tiffany, did not seem to think it was a big deal either. Fast forward two months, and we are sitting at her place having dinner. That was her idea of how she could “show her support.” She
hated
to cook, and as I chewed on what she called “dinner,” I remembered why we never did this. “I don’t see why you’re having a problem finding a job,” she said. But what I heard was:
You are not even trying! Get off your ass!
It ended up in a nasty fight, and I ended up sleeping alone.

The next day I sold my big-screen TV and my stereo. I called Tiffany and told her we were going to dinner. Of course she had to ask if I had gotten a job. “Never mind that,” I said. “We’re going to Legal Seafood, and then to Old Towne for drinks.” It was nice hearing the chill leave her voice—a chill I was hearing more and more often. I didn’t understand the tone then; I just knew it made me sick to my stomach.

She came by around 7:30 that night—late, which was unusual. I was going to drive. With my temporary windfall I could afford to put gas in the car. The car note was three months past due, but I had talked to them. I told them I would electronically transfer the money the next day for a month’s worth of payments. The women assured me that it would save the car from repo. So there we were sitting in my almost empty condo, and I am desperately trying to get a smile from her . . .

She had been stunned when she had seen that almost everything was gone. I didn’t get it. It was just stuff to
me. I told her, “We are what’s important.” Her mumbled response and failure to meet my eyes were not reassuring.

After a rather long and—for me—painful silence, we got up to go eat. We had already missed the time I had made for the reservation, but I didn’t think it would be a big deal. It was not like they were going to be crowded nowadays. I knew, because I had applied to work there as a waiter. There was only one problem: My car was gone.

“Lying bastards!” came out as a strangled shout. They had come and snatched it. I stood there and started to shake. Not just from knowing that my car had been towed. No, it was a symbol for everything that was going wrong in my life. Everything was being towed away, and I think then I realized it wasn’t going to come back, either. I looked at Tiffany. I suppose I was waiting for her to say something supportive. Instead, all I got was a look of scorn and a “Well, maybe you should have made the freaking payment!” She stomped off to her car, which she had insisted on driving separately—me following her . . .

We went back and forth during the next week, but it was over: “I’m sorry, I don’t think we have a future,” she told me. My translation:
You’re a loser and I don’t do losers.
It definitely didn’t help me in my struggle to keep my act together.

The first time I killed a man was almost by accident. Almost. I did not go looking for him, nor had I really even thought about it. If anything, I was thinking about killing myself. The idea of living in the woods, vacant homes, or wherever I ended up did not resonate well with me as a long-term lifestyle choice. This was in the beginning, when I still was not comfortable at night in the woods by myself. It turned out to be a good thing—good, because that is when I found a purpose for living.

Because the woods made me uncomfortable, I slept in the woods near one of the lots where the Car People parked. I settled in about three hundred yards away. Originally, I had tried sleeping about a hundred yards away, but that did not work out: Too many people walked out about that distance at night to take a piss. Plus, it put me close enough that the lights and hum from the parking lot lampposts bothered me. Moving back that extra two hundred yards got me out of physical range, of both the weak bladders and the resulting smell. Eventually, the
county would drop a couple of Porta-Potties there. As far as I know they never came back to empty them. The Car People just hooked a rope to them before a rain and dragged them into the woods.

One night late in that first summer I was lying there, unable to sleep, pondering exactly what the hell I was going to do when it got colder. It was probably past midnight since the Car People usually went to sleep early. Back then, they had to move their cars out of the lot before the employees began coming in. And, it was hard on the battery to run anything other than the “house” lights after dark. Later on, they could park there forever, as no employees were going to be coming to work anytime in the foreseeable future. Eventually, the bolder ones found a way in and began living in the empty building itself. The joke was, they had gone “from granite countertops to marble floors.”