Fingerless Gloves (2 page)

People knew James and I smoked pot. In fact, we were the first two people at our school who ever spoke about drug use as a recreational thing…something that could be fun. The first time we ever got high, we smoked out of an apple at a house party. It was our sophomore year and we were sitting on this ratty couch in some senior’s abandoned, parentless home. Someone passed James an apple with holes carved in it. The apple was uncurling smoke like some sick Halloween decoration. James followed the burnout’s instructions, lit one end, placed his fingers correctly, and coughed as he exhaled unevenly. James passed the apple to me and, after seeing him smoke it, I followed suit. The smoke entered my lungs and was immediately rejected by my developing body. I coughed and coughed to the point that the older kids, presumably more experienced, were laughing at me. After that night, I guess people had started talking and starting rumors. I remember classmates asking me “if it was true that I had smoked two pounds of grass with a bunch of seniors.” Needless to say, we quenched the rumors down to nothing by speaking of our extensive pot experience with the voices of experts in the field. When kids asked about it, we never joked or made light of it. We told them that pot had made us feel level-headed and even. In reality, we never even felt high that first night. It was one of the only times James and I shared the attention of our classmates.

The second time was out of a one-hitter that looked like a cigarette. I had bought that gem of a piece on the boardwalk on a “walk by myself” during my family vacation. My family, being pretty middle class, treated these family vacations with a particular reverence. We never went anywhere extravagant… usually just to a local beach where we’d rent a house for a week. After James and I had talked up recreationally smoking pot to the rest of our all-too-eager-to-listen classmates, I figured it was time we owned our own piece of drug paraphernalia. I didn’t have enough money to afford a 4-foot bong with an ash catcher, or a handcrafted hurricane. I only had enough money on me at the time to buy that one-hitter. I thought it was sleek and undetectable. It looked like a cigarette when you lit it, when you carried it and when you showed it off.

That year, we started buying bags of pretty good weed off the starting catcher on our high-school baseball team. He got it from a girl who got it from someone called “Davey Grease.” Our knowledge of the line of contraband flow simply ended after Davey Grease. The Grease, as he was known, was a 6th year senior rumored to be repeating 12th grade due to a GPA that never cracked 1.00 and a handful of misdemeanors to his name. We saw him in the hallways between classes, wearing Megadeth shirts and jet-black jeans. He would turn up, and then leave just as fast. I’m not sure why Davey even bothered with high school. His father owned an auto body two towns away and, from when The Grease was 13 years old, his future just seemed sort of decided. As far as where the pot came from, for all I knew Davey was growing it in some makeshift greenhouse in the garage where he kept his souped up, 1992 Ford Mustang GT. Later, I would find out that the varsity catcher on the baseball team was the only kid Grease ever sold to directly. The catcher would distribute to the rest of the plebeian high school clientele. The flow of non-habit-forming drugs at our school was highly refined and complicated, the way you see it in those conceptual coming-of-age movies.

That night, on the worst night of my life, I was 25 years old. James Squire was 25 years old. I would live to see 26. After 12th grade, James went away to a university while I stayed home and commuted to a local community college. I’m not sure why I made that decision. When it came time to apply to colleges, I guess I didn’t give myself any credit at all. I didn’t think my transcript, my references or even my personal essay was worthy of any big, expensive school. Every college I applied to had been within a half hour of my house. I got in to every single one without a single worry. James and I spent those next four college-life summer breaks swapping stories, his always infinitely more interesting that mine. He told me about staying up until 4am, absolutely ripped, trying to walk through the McDonald’s drive-thru. James put on just enough weight for it to be noticeable. His wardrobe got a little looser. During those years, I still competed with my parents to have the house to myself on Friday nights. I’m hard-pressed to say that staying home for college was lonely. I had a few friends, did a few things, but all in all it just seemed inconsequential.

We attended each other’s graduations. His was on a gigantic football field, with a big jumbotron in the middle. Mine was in a gymnasium, with some half-inflated balloons hanging from collapsible bleachers. I remember sitting at James’ graduation, waiting for them to get to “S”…I thought about the obscene number of kids enrolled in his school, and how each one got their name spelled out on that screen. After they called James, and all the festivities ended, I helped him pack up his apartment, which was absolutely destroyed. There were holes in the walls and Wiffle Ball bats broken in half. Imprints of football laces were permanently burned into the ceilings. The contents of the fridge were down to an 18 of Beast and seven containers of mustard. His room needed to be, or at least should have been decontaminated by a professional Haz-Mat team.

His face on that car ride after graduation was absolutely miserable. He drove both of us home and, just as he was passing the sign at the entrance/exit to the school, he took his eyes off the road to give one more look back. I guess, in deciding your best years, some stories couldn’t even be told. James Squire had left our town, seen the outside world, lived on some imaginary brink of the adulthood bubble, and was now being sucked back into the vortex that I never had the luxury of escaping, if only for a breath of air. I remember that sign, red and gigantic…and I remember the look he gave it, as if he was unloading some substantial period of time onto it.

We both got “real world” jobs at 23. James was pushing files at a gigantic financial company in the city that bordered our cluster of suburbia. It wasn’t a great job and it took him four interviews and a three-month trial period to get it. He majored in Business Administration. I had no idea what he hoped his area of expertise would or should be, but I imagined it was more than alphabetizing files. I justified his misery by thinking that it seemed like James chose a solid major and everyone has to start at the bottom of the ladder. James complained endlessly about the job - how he was given no real work to do and how there was no room to advance at his office. He gave himself a year before he’d start looking for something new. He was coming up on the end of his second year as a glorified file clerk.

I was working as a set production assistant at a major cable network. It wasn’t glamorous. I was expected to fetch coffee, come in early and stay late, push lighting rigs around, carry equipment, and deal with the assistants to mid-to-low level celebrities. I was a jack-of-all-trades…the grease that turned the most basic elements of production. Some days required me to physically work …while other days were just a mental test of how much verbal abuse I could ignore.

That worst Friday night was the first Friday I had gotten home at a reasonable hour in about two months. At my tiny school, I majored in Philosophy with a minor in Criminal Justice. To be honest, the job I took was just because someone knew someone who was trying to fill the position. The pay was decent enough. I had little-to-no fun money, but I could afford to maintain my lifestyle. That job required basic knowledge of television production, which I picked up on after a few clueless months. I had never seen the inner workings of a studio, nor did I know industry jargon and terminology. Like James, I was looking for something new, something challenging…something in my field. I had dreams of being a college professor…of going to school a few more years and eventually teaching. This would never happen. Running around like a lunatic trying to find the person who ordered the double-skim Caramel Ice Topper with extra whipped and two pumps wasn’t exactly how I saw myself spending my weekdays.

James and I went for drinks after work on particularly difficult days. We went to see independent films and shitty action movies. We played off each other to flirt with girls, even if they were just passing us by on the city street. Occasionally, when we felt like it, we showed up at random parties and bars…usually for birthday parties or going away parties or engagement parties or something adult and significant. I had no girlfriend and no prospects. At 25, James Squire claimed he was searching for a girl to settle down with, but he was still playing Sega Genesis like it never went out of style. I knew that he was riding out an epic cold streak with girls.

Overall, despite the pitfalls of our jobs, we both had meager health insurance, a little money coming in and, between the two of us, we had my apartment to crash at and James’ parents house to bum around in on nights when Mr. and Mrs. Squire went out for dinner or to the theater or some other activity. Our town had never seemed smaller than it did during those first years we were out of school. I did my grocery shopping at the same supermarket where my mom shopped. James drove to a generic office building to sit under fluorescent lights for the length of a workday. I commuted by car down to the waterfront, right on the border of the city, where the cable network had strangely set up their studio and offices. I’m sure there was some logical reason they wanted to avoid the city, but they never told me. Maybe it was cheaper property to rent or own or something. Maybe I’d never understand it. The station had been taking some ratings hits, had gone through some rounds of layoffs, and the employees convinced one another that we were now on the up and up, just waiting to break through again. In the meantime, you could smell the gasoline from the ferries cutting up the already-foul air. The river water, while pristine from a distance, looked chunky and toxic up close, like vomit lapping at an invisible shoreline.

The worst night of my life was clear and cloudless, but the wind through my open window kept blowing the framed pictures down in my apartment. I always kept it cold in my living space. I always have. James lived at home because, as he put it, renting was just throwing your money away to own nothing. Fact was, he made enough money to rent something small, maybe have a roommate, maybe live with me…but he just never got around to it. His mom still folded his clothes if he wasn’t home, cooked dinner six nights a week, and made James leave the door open a crack during those instances girls were brought back. I guess, coming home from college, some kids get wanderlust to get out and see the world on their own. Some kids just miss the comforts of home. James, for all his excuses and the lax way he approached his free time, was the latter. My apartment was in the same city suburb we had grown up in, no more than 15 minutes from James’ house. I lived above a shopping plaza that my parents, old neighbors, and a handful of couples who never made it out of our town after high school all frequented.

That night, after his working five straight days, 8am-7pm, I imagined James was beat. That’s why I didn’t call or text. Some nights we hung out, others we just kind of existed in our own space. Guys are funny that way. Usually, being on our own meant James taking a “drive” and me hanging out watching some old movies on one of the few cable stations I got in my apartment. I would have been content watching movies by myself that Friday, except for the fact that it was so early. I began to get the itch…the feeling that I had to go out and make something of the night. I began to reflect on every Friday night I had spent in, watching movies, and the thought that I was wasting precious time kept creeping up in my mind. The problem was, I had no plans, nowhere to really go. I could drive around, go to the usual spots to see if anyone was around. I could head to the multiplex. All the thoughts pushing each other in my head landed me feeling a most basic need: hunger. The worst night of my life begins with a Healthy Choice microwave dinner at 5pm on the dot. Let’s start.