Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  Chapter 21

  PARTY IS A WEIRD WORD ’cause it can mean so many different things.

  I went to a party with Nick and Donnie tonight. Their version of a party apparently entails a bunch of dudes, mostly, and a few girls, in a second floor studio apartment downtown above a barber shop. Ages ranged from 25-ish to 40-ish with me being the one exception (until later, anyway). Household incomes ranged from $0 to $14,000 annually, I’m guessing. The dental hygiene ranged from fair to very poor. The dress code was casual.

  We walked into the apartment. A small group of adults stood around a pony keg of Labatt Blue that was squatting in the kitchen.

  A party of younger kids has an air of enthusiasm and excitement as their futures are wide open in front of them. This one? Not so much. I guess you could say it had an air of shwag weed and unpaid child support.

  Let’s not mince words. These people are members of the underclass, and not the sympathetic, down-on-their-luck types. The full-on criminals. Some of them can’t read. Most of them don’t read. All of them are addicted to booze or drugs or both.

  I decided not to drink. You’ve got to keep your wits about you in the presence of this kind of company, right? I walked around the party to watch all the people.

  Two 40-year-old men took turns with a beer bong in the kitchen area while two other gentlemen argued about NASCAR. One wore a trucker hat while the other sported a t-shirt with the sleeves scissored off.

  “There ain’t no way he’ll beat Jimmie Johnson in wins,” Trucker Hat said.

  “Yeah, but those pussies are just lucky that Dale Earnhardt, Sr. isn’t around anymore. He’d wipe the floor with their asses,” Sleeveless said.

  I also heard one guy expound upon the price of a “pound of dope wholesale” and toss out some mental math returns on how much you could make by dividing it up for retail.

  Spots on the couch became a valued commodity. Vulture types circled patiently, and the second someone got up to go to the bathroom or refill their cup, the birds of prey swooped in to claim their seat. Harsh words were exchanged a time or two as you might imagine, but possession is nine-tenths of all seating law.

  No matter where I turned, though, I couldn’t avoid the gaze of a scrawny guy with a mohawk and a big chain around his neck. Not like a jewelry chain. A dog chain. His face was all emaciated like someone in an AIDs ward, and his eyes had that perpetually paranoid wide open all the time look. I bet he could go days without blinking. He seemed to be watching me, which I did not, you must understand, care for.

  Donnie hunched by the stereo, his arm around some pear-shaped girl’s waist. He whispered into her ear. Nick milled around with some guys in the hallway leading to the bathroom. I had my shoulders squared away from the mohawk creep, so I didn’t see him approaching me.

  “What’s your deal?” he said, dangerously close to my ear.

  There is something unsettling about someone sneaking up behind you. And yet I placed his voice right away as the one I’d heard detailing the in and outs of “slangin’ a pound of dope.” I wheeled to face him. He was about six inches shorter than me, so I stared down at him, our faces a little too close for comfort.

  “What?” I said.

  “I said what’s your deal?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I’ve reached a point in my life where I no longer feel obliged to answer nonsense questions. I did note that his front teeth were stained with chocolatey swirls, and the molars visible from the sides of his mouth were rotting away like crazy.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

  “I’m Jake,” I said.

  I would’ve asked who the hell he was, but, frankly, I didn’t want to know this guy. Why would I ever want to? Maybe if I had questions about scabies or something, I could contact this person and get the details straightened out. He could recommend ointments and such.

  “Jake, huh?” he said.

  We stared at each other for a silent moment.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He laughed through a grimace of rotting teeth.

  “Shit. I can tell just by lookin’ at ya that you ain’t nothin’ but trouble,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “You know someone here or what?” he said.

  I nodded toward Nick.

  “I’m Nick’s cousin.”

  His eyes shifted over to Nick and back. He did a double-take, and the faintest flinch shook his frame. The actual movement was subtle, yet I picked up on it so clearly. Like the air around him changed. He glanced back at me and quickly broke eye contact, his gaze sweeping to the floor.

  “Ah, that’s cool,” he said, and he walked off.

  Whatever. I slid open the sliding glass door to squeeze onto the small balcony where the hoards of smokers huddled. Nothing like fresh, carcinogenic air. I was leaning on the wrought iron rail when Nick came up beside me. He took a long drink from his Dixie cup and mopped beer foam off of his top lip with the collar of his t-shirt.

  “So what did Dildo Sucker want?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Dildo Sucker. I saw him talkin’ to you in there. What did he want?”

  “You mean the mohawk guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People call him Dildo Sucker?”

  “Yeah. Well, I mean, I do.”

  “What’s that all about?”

  “He owed me money and kept avoidin’ me, so I started gettin’ people to prank call him and tell him that we all know that he sucks on dildos. Stuff like that.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, but it didn’t. “He asked me what my deal was, and then he left me alone.”

  Nick nodded and took another drink.

  * * *

  “Can you say?!” is one of my least favorite clichés. Like if a football team intercepts a pass, some douchebag watching the game has to say:

  “Can you say interception?!”

  No. But I can say, “Shut the fuck up, cocksucker.”

  * * *

  The party dragged on for hours. Most of the activities stayed the same but slowed down. Literally, I mean. The topics of conversation remained in the same realm, but everyone’s speech got slurred. The party-goers’ motor skills got slower and stumblier. Reaction times? You guessed it. Real fuckin’ slow.

  Later on some high school kids showed up. (Three guys. No one that I recognized from school or anything, but you could tell they were young, you know?) The keg was empty, but someone was giving these kids wine coolers, which seemed funny in a way. Three dudes drinking Bahama Mama flavored wine coolers. (Fine. I guess now I get why Donnie was so amused by the Strawberry Hill.)

  Some arm wrestling led to a shoving match among the guys who were debating NASCAR earlier, so I kind of lost track of these high school kids for a while. When I next noticed them, they were in the bath tub, taking turns making out with this 38-year-old woman that I’d met earlier named Meg. (Needless to say, Meg has a number of issues.)

  It was repulsive. I mean, I really wanted to tell them to stop it. But then I thought about it. Nobody else here cared. Why should I care? Right? Why should it bother me so much to see these underage strangers making out with a middle-aged woman? It’s not like I object all that strongly on moral grounds or anything.

  And then I realized that it was my right brain reacting, like animal instincts kicking in, ’cause this is potentially bad for the species. Meg has problems. Do not mate with Meg. I repeat, do not mate with Meg!

  * * *

  I had a dream that I was lying in bed, and a wolf charged at me. Instinctively, I grabbed the snout and jaw and kept the immense fangs pried apart. And it thrashed its head around, trying to shake free to kill me. But I somehow knew the whole time that it had the capacity to be a nice wolf. Like there was no malice in its actions, you know? It’s just a wolf. A wild animal. It didn’t know any better.

  I held the jaw open for a long time, and then I woke up.

  Chapter 22

  THE GYM TEACHER UNLOCKED THE ball c
loset and stepped out of view into the dark cavern. A series of basketballs flew out onto the gym floor. They bounced in all directions as the students swarmed like insects to collect them. Once the proper number of balls were unleashed, Mr. Smith emerged from his ball cave.

  “Pair up and pick a hoop,” he said. “We’re working on free throws today.”

  The students zigged and zagged all around, basketballs thudded on the floor, and the growing murmur of the collective voices took the place of the silence that had been there a moment before.

  A whistle blew. The silence returned. Mr. Smith raised his hand to further command our attention.

  “One more thing,” he said. “No hanging on the nets today to pull yourself up and dunk it. It stretches ’em out and ruins ’em. I’m looking at you, Koontz.”

  Billy Koontz grinned with embarrassment.

  “Go on,” Mr. Smith said, letting his hand drop to his side.

  I moved toward Robert, but he wouldn’t look at me. He hadn’t talked to me in a couple weeks, but that couldn’t last forever, could it?

  As I opened my mouth to ask if we’d be partners like we always were, he tapped Billy Koontz on the shoulder, nodded at him, and they moved away from me toward the hoop in the far corner.

  * * *

  So I read about this product called the Thundershirt. It’s this fabric that you wrap and strap around your dog that provides constant gentle pressure to the animal’s torso. This synthetic hug eases their stress and anxiety from the sound of thunder or separation from their owner. Pretty much all anxiety. It’s 80% effective. Kinda crazy.

  It kind of boils things down in a weird way. This simple mammal has a button you can press that reduces its anxiety no matter what. Let’s call it the hug button. You put this fabric on the dog, it presses the hug button, and they calm down. Totally nuts.

  But we’re mammals, too, right? Aren’t we probably the same? Do we have ridiculously simple stimulus buttons of our own like that? I think we must.

  They cost like $40. The Thundershirts, I mean. That’s for the black. I think it’s more to get a fancy color.

  * * *

  So reading up further, some autistic people use this thing called a hug machine. They find it difficult to turn to other people for affection, and they actually can find hugging a real person to be overstimulating, so they developed this machine they sit in, and it squeezes them. This relaxes them and relieves their stress. Some use the machine on a daily basis. It basically replaces physical affection from other people altogether.

  And it’s an old invention. I think it predates the damn Thundershirt by decades.

  That’s pretty weird, though. I mean, it makes sense, but it’s still hard to believe it would work for a person in a way.

  Chapter 23

  NICK DOESN’T ACTUALLY DRINK THAT often, interestingly enough. When he does, though, he is completely out of control.

  I went to his apartment after school today, and he was, indeed, quite drunk. It was uncomfortable. Donnie and I just sat there while he ranted and raved and was generally a total dick to both of us.

  “You’re like thirty, and you work at Taco Bell. Serving your dog meat tacos to big fatties all day long,” he slurred at Donnie. “Fuckin’ pathetic.”

  Spit flew out of Nick’s mouth when he laughed.

  But we couldn’t leave. Or at least that’s how I felt. I felt like he would be offended if I left or something and might become hostile. Or more hostile than he already was, I guess.

  He chain smoked the whole time and kept taking big swigs out of this half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam. His face was all shiny.

  “Buncha pussies,” he said. He didn’t explain any kind of context for the sentence fragment. I assumed he was calling Donnie and me pussies, but who knows?

  Donnie gave me a glance, and then the two of us went back to staring at the floor without saying anything. I traced my finger along the seam running up the side of my jeans.

  Nick took another slug off of the Jim Beam, and two rivers of whiskey poured down from the corners of his mouth and onto his shirt. He wiped his wrist across his mouth, effectively smearing the bourbon over most of his face.

  “Some day you pussies will turn on the TV and see me on there. And you’ll be all like, ‘Damn. That’s Nick. I used to know that fuggin’ guy.’”

  He fidgeted in his chair a moment and everything got quiet. Awkward.

  “Ain’t that right, Donnie?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ain’t that shit right?”

  “It’s right.”

  He sat back in his chair. His neck slackened, and his head drooped back onto the headrest. He closed his eyes. Donnie looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged.

  I heard the grind and click of a Bic lighter, and when I looked back at Nick, he was setting an envelope on fire. He was burning the damn mail.

  “What the hell?” Donnie said.

  He sprang from his chair and tore the letter from Nick’s hand. Flames flickered along the edge of the paper, so Donnie tossed it to the floor and stomped it out.

  “What is wrong with you?” Donnie said.

  Nick just laughed. I picked the envelope up and saw that it was actually a piece of Tammie’s mail. (Tamra Mooney. I had never known her full name before that.) It still had her old address and everything, but it was post-marked for yesterday’s date which didn’t seem right.

  “Are you picking up Tammie’s mail for her or something?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. He was still smiling, but he didn’t look right somehow. I mean, he seemed tense all of a sudden.

  “So you’re going to forward it to her in Ohio?” I said.

  “I think he plans to incinerate it for her,” Donnie said.

  Nick laughed again.

  “She doesn’t need all that mail,” he said. “Believe me.”

  It didn’t really make sense, but he was so drunk, you know? It probably wasn’t worth trying to sort it all out just then.

  Nick grabbed the little lever on the side of his chair and un-reclined suddenly. He pushed himself to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” he said and headed for the door.

  Donnie glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Where are we going?”

  Nick scoffed, like it was obvious or something.

  “To the Hunt Club.”

  The Hunt Club is like this bar-slash-restaurant with taxidermied animal heads lining the walls. Mostly hooved beasts — deer, caribou, elk, boar and so on. It’s not exactly a rowdy place. In fact, it usually draws an older crowd, but Nick managed to start trouble anyway.

  We walked in and Nick pretty much immediately rammed his elbow into the back of a white-haired guy at the bar. In fairness, I think Nick was just trying to push his way to the front, but he really blasted this guy, and the old man dumped a beer all over himself. Nick didn’t seem to realize he’d bumped anyone. He felt the need, however, to chime in once he noticed that the old guy’s shirt was wet and frothy.

  “Watch where you’re going, fag,” he said.

  All class.

  Next, we overheard a tall guy telling his friends that he was making a scrapbook for this girl that he had a crush on.

  “Now that we’re finally going out, I just want to put something together that tells the story of how we met and how long we’ve known each other,” he said.

  Nick chimed in again.

  “I’d probably think that was creepy as hell,” he said. He wasn’t just talking directly to the guy but yelling across the room to him. “If some weirdo made a scrapbook about how long he’d been stalkin’ me or whatever for our first date. I wouldn’t like that if I was a girl. I’d be gettin’ a damn restrainin’ order.”

  The guy’s cheeks went all red. His friends looked mad, but they also looked a little intimidated by Nick. Rightfully so, I suppose. These were office workers with the baby soft hands that come with never doing a day of manual labor in one’s life.

 
; It went on like this with Nick confronting and annoying people, until he finally pushed a bald guy down by the jukebox.

  A few minutes later, the manager came over.

  “I’m going to need you gentlemen to leave before I call the cops.”

  Nick sized him up for a moment, but the guy was pretty burly, so ultimately we left without further incident.

  I realized somewhere in there that I’d never seen Nick let go like this before. He’s usually very under control of his demeanor and all of that. I mean, he’s a cold, calculating thief, really. Getting all drunk and obnoxious like this didn’t seem right. It didn’t fit the guy that was teaching me this screwed up philosophy or whatever the hell he was teaching me.

  Maybe that’s why he doesn’t do it often, I guess. It seems most ridiculous to suggest that I saw something of his dark side or something like that, ’cause let’s face it, this guy doesn’t exactly have a light side. Still, there was something ugly about it. He let his underlying emotions bubble to the surface, and it turns out what’s hiding down there is this immature, impulsive bully. Is that like his real self? Not sure. In any case, he let it out a little bit tonight, and I didn’t like it.

  And that observation was as close as I got to a lesson this week.

  * * *

  In Psychology today we talked about impulse control disorders. Basically at all times our brain is sending out these impulses. Some of which we’re very conscious of. Others emit from places in the right brain that our conscious mind doesn’t really have access to. They all affect our thoughts and behavior, either way.

  So an impulse is like a little signal that gives you the urge to do something. Some are pretty normal: An impulse to eat. An impulse to have sex (and reproduce). Some are conditioned responses that people learn based on their behavior: A nicotine addict will get an impulse to smoke. An alcoholic gets the urge to drink. And so on.

  But there are violent impulses coming out of there, too. An impulse to strike someone you’re mad at. Stuff like that. And most of the time, most people can control these impulses. They can sort of withstand that initial draw to behave a certain way because they can reason out the negative long term effects. Essentially, they can think, “I shouldn’t punch this guy in the face. I will go to jail. If I just let it go, I won’t go to jail.” Or, “I shouldn’t drink. I have to drive home, and I don’t want to get arrested or get in a wreck.”