MDMA

PART 1

I’m going to split this short story into two parts since it is well over 25 pages long, and attention spans are short these days. I hope you enjoy part one!

Part 1

Someone put porn on three days ago, and it was still playing, the sound off, looping on repeat. The VHS could be heard stopping, rewinding itself, and then playing again every two hours or so. Not that any of us noticed.

Alex shimmied into the living room from his bedroom, all five foot four of him. He slinked past Alina, her long legs kicked up on an ottoman, painting her toenails. He made big swooping movements with one of his short arms, standing in front of us, trying to get our attention and saying, “Hey, guys, you gotta check this out!”

Drew looked up from a bong, blue-grey smoke billowing out of the corners of his mouth. His attention now diverted from the greenish-brown weed he had spread out on a Machine Christ record, from his hands separating the stems and seeds on the back cover. You could still faintly see a woman encapsulated in silver tubing and miles of red and black wire; she looked like a radio shack had thrown up all over her and was now drowning in Drew’s pile of brick weed.

Alex didn’t even mention it.

The porn.

Nobody did.

The blonde hair of the porn actress swooshed like the excited tail of an Afghan hound behind Alex. He just stood in front of it, in front of her, and her permanently open mouth. Haloed in it. Dwarfed by Drew’s box-framed 70-inch flat screen TV, playing Drew’s father’s copy of Anal Queens 17 as Alex held a sad, little plant in his hands in front of us.

For some reason, as Alex stood there, silhouetted in front of 70 inches of back-projected porno, it reminded me of a time when I came home early from high school, and no one heard the condo door open or close as I entered. There was porn playing on the big screen then, too—I guess, when wasn’t porn playing on the big screen?

On that day, Drew and Alex sat next to one another; their heads draped back against the plush brown couch that delineated the living room from the kitchen/dining room. Their heads kind of looked like two turtles napping on the same log.

Sneaking up behind them, thinking they were sleeping. That they left the porno on repeat, as we always seemed to do. Then, getting closer—a medically perfected pair of tits now blown up to the size of two medium-sized dogs on the TV— I heard Alex groan, and his head cranked back and then jutted forward, almost to his chest, breathing like he just ran a marathon. He raised his hand, examining gelatinous milky globs that cascaded over the side of his right fist. I stood there watching the backs of Alex and Drew’s heads as Drew came too, as they both stared at their hands, at their genetic code, balancing like beached jellyfish on the edge of their fists. Then, standing behind them, transfixed on the whole scene, I watched each of them, independently of one another, slurp the sticky goo into their mouths, lick their hands clean, and slump back into the couch. The backs of their heads silhouetted in front of Jack Hammer and Sally Slutters, absolutely going to town on each other.

Alex and Drew only realized I was there when the sound of my exaggerated barf noises alerted them to my presence, turning around to see me hunched over, hands on my knees, fake barfing on the carpet, sounding like a sea lion dancing for tricks behind them.

Huuhk!

Huuhk!

Huuhk!

Alex smiled that big dumb smile of his—haloed in porn—Just like he was now.

Pulling my Bucky Star blaster toy laser gun, the one that went everywhere with me, the one my Grandpa got me before he died, I pointed it at Alex and pulled the trigger. The thing went off, vibrating, beeping, and whooing. It oscillated in five different colors of light, flashing from every facet, illuminating all our faces, and I asked, “Why’d you let him move in here again?”

I’m not sure Drew was even on this planet as he tried to engage me. His eyes were the color of Mars and about as far away. He just replied, “Dude, this drum part coming up is sick!” And I rolled my eyes and looked to Alina, who was now arching her neck, looking up from her wet, Tiffany-blue toenails that she had been painting this whole time. Alina dug out a slight smile for my comedic murder of Alex and his stupid plant with a toy laser gun. But now she held her head at a sharp 90-degree angle, trying to see the porn actress getting her butthole absolutely pummeled behind Alex’s petite frame, obscuring most of it.

Looking at Alex, I said, “Ok, bud, what’s this all about? You starting your own garden or something? You know we don’t have a yard, right?” And he just looked at me, absolutely dumbfounded at my question, and I looked at him, mulling it over in whatever anyone may have considered brains in that skull of his, and I made a bet with myself that if I went up to him right now and cupped my lips over his nose and blew really hard, it would make that hollow, trumpet BWAAAAAA sound like a conch shell in his skull. But instead, I tried to make out the sad little plant that he held in his hands. How the drooping greenery reminded me of his pitiful little dick, and his belly full of jizz from the day when I walked in on him and Drew actually watching Anal Queens 17.

The thing, the tiny little excuse for a plant, was a single stem about four or five inches tall, peeking out of a standard black plastic planting pot. The kind you’d get at any home and garden store. The ones your mom might have started a tomato plant in, or some kind of perennial, before she put them in the ground. At the top of the four or five inches of green stem sat one measly leaf, and I counted seven points on it.

“I started growing my own weed, guys! In the closet in my room. I got a couple lights. Look, I got my first leaf! How cool, huh?” Alex asked and stared at us like a golden retriever waiting for its ball.

“Yeah, dude. Neat.” I replied, my face pinched like the porn actresses’ butthole.

“I think I’m going to put it out on the balcony to get some sun. My little baby needs the real stuff! Don’t ya, honey?” Alex said to the plant, holding it up to his face, making puckered goldfish-kissy lips with his mouth, as a giant two-foot cock blew its load on a pink butthole behind him.

+++

Six months earlier, Alex’s younger brother showed up on our doorstep. I’m not even sure how he found out where we lived. How he figured out that we, all five of us, moved into Drew’s dad’s two-bedroom condo after his mom and dad got back together two summers ago. I stood there next to Drew as his dad told him how he liked his mother’s place better because it had a sauna in the basement, which felt good on his old construction-worker knees.

I’ll never know exactly how Alex’s brother got the lowdown on us living in Drew’s dad’s condo, but we all figured it was Alex who told him to come live with us once he got back into town.

Alex’s brother told us—mostly Alex—bragging the whole time that he broke out of one of those rehabs where your parents let them kidnap you in the middle of the night, ship you off to somewhere like Colorado, or New Mexico. Somewhere desolate and remote, where you won’t know a soul. The ones where they blindfold you, stick you on a private jet, escorted by huge thuggish dudes named Ivan or Dimetri or whatever, and they watch your every move the whole time until you're locked up on that mountain top.

I looked at Alex’s brother’s fingernails as he talked to us. They were undercut with grime and dirt, oil or something, that seemed to be embedded in each groove of his fingerprints. His hair had the sheen of an oil slick, and I stared at his disheveled state as he went on about how he said he bribed the night guard with a blow job, took the guy’s keys, and scaled down a mountain in the winter in just his bare feet. Hitchhiked the whole way back to Minnesota.

We were bad kids, but not as bad as Alex’s brother. Low-level criminals, really, just innocent shitheads trying to keep our heads above water. I think that’s how I would describe us. Sure, Alex was always kind of trying to be the Scarface of shitty dirt weed in our little town, but most of the time, we just sold fake pills to rich kids already tripping balls at raves in the big city. They never even questioned the big fat white pills with an uppercase E on it: Excedrin made for an easy buck. These candy-flipped-off teenagers with mommy and daddy’s money burning a hole in their pockets were too high and trying to get higher to even notice or care that what we sold them wouldn’t get them high, but might help the headache they would undoubtedly have tomorrow. The little doped-up shits always coming up to us an hour or so later, telling us how good the body high was. Drew saying something like, “You want to buy a couple more for later? We’re running low, not sure we’ll have any next weekend.”

And they always did.

That’s how we afford the base chemicals and glassware.

The first to show up in the hallway, where the whole building got its mail, was the Safrole, which came in a little barrel with hazardous-chemical stickers all over it.

Then came the Hydrobromic acid, in a blue barrel with a skull-and-crossbones sticker. This one, our neighbor Mrs. Smith saw sitting in the front lobby of the Condo building, and she scowled at Matt and me as we hefted it up to the third floor.

You’d be surprised how few difficult-to-acquire chemicals it takes to make most drugs. Almost all of them can be purchased by mail with little to no effort. As long as you’re willing to be slightly deceitful.

Next came all the glass beakers that Alex’s brother said we needed to buy.

A three-count of EZBio, single-use bottle assembly, 60ml unit.

A Puregrip Erlenmeyer flask, one 500ml and two 250ml units.

And all the hoses and gaskets and Bunsen burners to make it all work—To cook up our clients’ escape from reality and our, the six of us’, escape from living in this dingy two-bedroom condo together.

Alex’s brother said we needed all this, the beakers and chemicals and plastic hoses to make the MDMA. He said this was how we would step up our game, really get our foot in the drug game, get out of just struggling by, flipping single fake pills to fucked off college kids.

Make real money.

“Put our stamp on the world,” as Alex’s brother put it.

At some point, Alex’s brother stole Mr. Hedgsworth’s mail, my math teacher, who lived in the building. Alex’s brother scored some type of documentation. Mr. Hedgworth’s teacher’s license, I guessed. maybe his new ID, and a Chemical company distributors catalog that came in the mail for him around the same time. All this, along with a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook that we picked up at a punk show two summers ago, and that supposed recipe that Alex’s brother got in rehab—These were our keys to the new future that Alex’s brother kept promising.

Now, none of us, other than Alex, maybe, who for some reason looked up to his shit head little brother, really wanted to go through with this plan. We were all happy selling the occasional dime bag of dirt weed here or there, or flipping some Excedrin for a couple of bucks, but making our own MDMA, like Alex’s brother was proposing, sounded complicated and dangerous, not to mention downright stupid to do in a condo in an idyllic tourist trap of a small town. Alina, one time, reminding Alex’s brother that we lived in the mecca of a million bored cops just looking for something to do, how you often saw them busting some dumb kid for making out with their questionably young girlfriend at a river lookout, or a teenage skateboarder waxing a public curb, trying to enjoy his summer off, one of these bored cops throwing the poor kid in juvie for the rest of summer, just because him and the rest of his overstuffed boys in blue were looking for any reason to feel important that day.

Alex’s brother scoffed in Alina’s face, saying, “I know what I’m doing. Remember who got the recipe. Remember who sucked that guy’s dirty dick to break out of that rehab-prison and hitchhiked all the way back here to make you all rich! It’s legit, too! If you don’t want to be rich, you can just hang back and watch the boys and me make all the money!” Alex’s brother said this, his chest all puffed up like some pissed-off pitbull, and poked his brother in the chest, continuing, “Ain’t that right, Alex? We’ll just keep all the money for ourselves, and get out of this shit hole, get our own place, we’ll have a fuckin gold toilet like Pablo Escobar, you just wait and see!”

Alina told him he was a fucking retard and went out to the balcony to smoke a cig and cool off, and I followed her, telling her she was right, and it did seem like a stupid idea. She took another drag, and her head hung low—A sad cartoon of herself—and I told her that if she wanted to get out of here, get out of town while those idiots blew up the condo, I’d go with her.

She asked, “Where would we go?” and looked out at the spattering of cars parked in the lot in front of us, and continued, “We’re just a bunch of teenage kids whose parents disowned us. We barely have any money. What could we do? Go sleep in my car for a few days, while they cook that shit up, then try to find somewhere we could kick it for a few months. Who knows how long it will take them to offload all the E. It might take them months. Or years, depending on how much they made, that’s, if the neighbors don’t say something first, or those idiots don’t blow themselves up in the process.”

Alina paused for a while, and we looked out at the cars coming and going, then mused, “It feels like we’re just stuck here with this idiot, and Drew, Matt, and Alex all seem like they want to do this, so I guess we’re doing it.” Alina finished and took a deep drag of her Marlboro light, exhaling the plume of smoke out into the air, three floors up above the parking lot, and I stared at her, her pixy hair cut lining her high cheekbones. I looked at her Tiffany Blue fingernails; the Marlboro Light clutched between them. Leaning up against the railing now, too, I looked out at the sea of cars in the parking lot, at Alina’s red Honda Civic, its front bumper duct taped in three places, our only way out.

Turning and facing Alina, I said, “I’m not sure, but I’ll figure it out. You can count on me. I’ll get us out of all this.”

Alina unfolded herself from the railing, looked at me, her long giraffe-like body extending, then shifting, facing me. She leaned over, crested herself down a couple of inches to meet my face, and said, “Stop being so stupid and sweet.” Then planted her face against mine, opened my mouth with hers, and slid her tongue along the ridge of my teeth. She pushed up against me, and I felt my Bucky star blaster laser gun that was in my front pocket shift and press between us—Cutting up against what I thought was her crotch, or her hip bone maybe—then she pumped my lips a couple more times and bit my lower lip as she pulled back up again to tower above me.

I stared into her eyes; they seemed to sparkle like the Saint Croix River on summer evenings when the light started to dip behind the birch trees. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the weed we smoked earlier that made her feel so magical in this moment. I’m pretty sure it was just her. Alina pulled out another Marlboro, lit it, and hunched her long frame back over the railing, and I stared at her, how her body looped and hung along the metal bars like a depressed animal at the zoo, and I wished there was something more I could do. Something real. Not just empty teenage promises.

We pressed against the railing, looking out at Alina’s car in the parking lot, and I felt we both played it out in our minds, the whole fantasy. It was there in her eyes, I swear, bubbling behind her blue grey pools. The whole tape of how we would run off together, lose these bozos— The two of us, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. Traveling cross-country fucking and making a buck the hard way. Wash some dishes at a truck stop. Sell some Excedrin to a bunch of thirteen-year-old skateboarders. Wash, rinse, repeat, then move on to the next town where no one knew us.

Hopefully, living a little longer than Bonnie and Clyde.

Alina took a drag of her Marlboro light and blew it in my eyes, springing me from my daydream, saying, “Don’t get all sprung on me now, you’re just the cutest boy here. Got it?” and she cocked a half-smile at me before walking through the sliding glass door and back into the condo.

Inside the condo, it was a roaring sea of masculinity. Alex, his brother, Dew, and Matt all boomed behind the double-pane glass door. I thumbed at the Bucky Star Blaster laser pistol in my pocket, rubbed it against my penis, still half-hard from making out with Alina, looked out at the sea of parked cars, then slid in through the glass door and back into the sea of chest thumping.

Alex, his brother, Drew, and Matt— all of them talked over each other, shouting really, about how each of them would sell more E than the next. How each of them would buy a cooler, faster car, or be dating a hotter model than the next.

“No! My girl will have triple E tits and feed me homemade pot brownies, while giving me a handie as I play Mario Kart!” Matt said, bits of half-eaten fish-stick flying from his mouth, raining down on Alex’s face and shoulders. Alex, poking up at him, stabbing at Matt’s chest, telling him he was trippin’. That Matt didn’t know shit about women, and he was a fucking hypocrite for eating fish sticks, because somehow Matt didn’t think fish sticks counted against being vegetarian. Then Alex shouted, “No woman with half a brain, and tits like that, would blink twice at a dumbass like you!” Then proceeded to shout that he, Alex, really knew what women wanted!

Alina just sat slumped against the couch, ignoring them all. She had, for the first time in I don’t know how long, replaced the constant stream of porno with MTV now, and held her arm out, turning the volume up, the video for Radiohead’s “ Creep “ muddying in with yelling boys posing as men.

+++

Later that night, after everyone had fallen asleep. Drew and Matt passed out somewhere in the living room, and Alex in his den of weed. Alina and I lay in the big King-sized bed that we all traded on and off with. The door was open, the light from the porno, which was back on, was flickering through. I was trying to read an issue of Swamp Thing, only slightly illuminated by the blue-white light of Anal Queens 17. Alina lay sprawled out under the sheets, on the other side of the king-size bed from me, her long, naked legs slightly pressed against mine, somehow from what felt like miles away. She played some sort of poker game, I think, on her Game Boy or maybe it was Tetris, the green light, uplighting her face and small, perky tits. I stared at her nipples that peeked through her spaghetti strap tank top. Then Alina looked at me through the edge of her eye, caught me, and said, “Tha’ fuck ya’ lookin at, weirdo?”

“Nothin, just,” I stammered.

“Not, just nothin! I can feel the heat off your rod from here; you little horn ball!” She said, putting the Game Boy in her lap. Then shifted her body slightly towards me. “Alright, come here,” she said, and grabbed me by the dick, and kissed me deep, parting my lips like on the balcony before.

We lay there stroking each other, and she rolled over and presented her pert, round ass to me, told me, “You can put it in my butt if you want.” And I felt her shimmy out of her underwear, as she spat on her hand and rubbed it on my cock and lined me up with her back entrance. She pushed herself back on me, let out a little moan as she did, and we moved back and forth, twisting the sheets underneath us—oh, how they were a hurricane swirling around, our stuck together bodies shifting like tidal winds. The two of us, swirling around Drew’s dad’s old bed, illuminated in the light of Anal Queen’s 17.

We gyrated together in the bed like that for a while, until Alina told me to grab the gun, to which I stopped for a moment, still hard inside her, and she repeated, but this time firmly saying, “Don’t stop, idiot, just grab the gun and put it on me!” My left arm reached back to the nightstand, still thrusting in Alina, fumbling to find my Bucky Star Blaster laser gun. I grabbed it and pulled its bejeweled, silver plastic form over her hips, pressing it near her wet mound and folds. Alina moaned and pushed into me more, pushed my hand with the laser gun in it harder against her crotch. I could hear her pubic hair scratch against the plastic of the gun as I pulled the trigger over and over again. The whooping and beeping, and the little vibrations the gun made, drowned out in our moans and heated breath. Our bodies danced in a multispectral flood of light until Alina arched her back, and I thrust hard into her pink little butthole, as she reached one of her mile-long arms behind herself, pulling me tighter as the Bucky star blaster gun, Alina, and I all exploded in a moment of fireworks.

+++

The next morning, I remember thinking I didn’t want to be held accountable for whatever Drew Matt, Alex, and his dipshit little brother were going to get into. How Alina told me, over the bad coffee Matt had made that morning, that she was going to crash at her stepmom’s place for a couple of days, and I should try to ask my mom if she would let me do the same.

That’s the thing with hairbrained ideas, there’s always some people who see the writing on the wall before it goes to shit. Maybe it’s your body telling you something’s not right, like some creep standing too close to you in line at the grocery store, or that chick you know for a fact slept with half the dudes in theater class, saying you don’t need to use a condom, that she’s clean. Your body just knows. It often takes the form of goosebumps or a nagging voice in your head, maybe your mom’s, or a weird fish you thought was God, the one who talked to you on that camping trip three years ago. Your body will tell you, just listen.

Alina drove me to my mom’s house. I took her up on her offer as the rest of the guys continued on with whatever consumed their lives while the sun was up.

+++

She wasn’t home yet, my mom, and Alina’s Honda Civic sputtered and wheezed in front of the house.

“So, you think you’re going to be ok at your stepmom’s house? She kick your mom out again? Drew said he saw her stumbling out of Munster’s bar, drunk, the other day. Maybe I could ask my mom if you could stay here too. You want me to?” I said, fumbling with the Bucky Star blaster laser gun in my pocket, not really looking at Alina, not really looking at anything.

“That’s sweet, but you and I both know your mom ain’t gonna let me stay there.” Alina said, twisting a piece of gum around her mouth, then continued, “Ok you gotta scram, Linda’s expecting me to help her plant her tomato garden today, and I can’t be late if I want this to last for more than three days. I’ll talk to you soon. It will all be ok. This will all blow over. Alex’s brother will probably end up in juvie for something else or just wander off to the next shiny object. We’ll be back to whatever our normal is in no time. Promise. Just keep your head down, and I’ll talk to you soon.” Then Alina stretched herself over the center console of the Honda and tied her lips into mine, sliding her tongue around my mouth, dancing for a moment, leaving the gum she was chewing on in my mouth, then pulling back, she exclaimed, “Don’t get all sprung on me now, you’re just the cutest boy in this car. Got it?”

I got out of the car, tucked my boner up into my waistband, wandered up the slanted driveway to my mom’s house, and plopped myself on my army surplus duffel bag next to the front door. I waited for my mom to get off work and sat outside her house for what felt like forever. I thought about breaking in through the window of my old room. I’d done it a million times before. But I knew, just like Alina helping her stepmom with her garden, if I was sitting in her kitchen munching away on her food, this whole plan would be fucked from the jump. So, I just sat there, on her stoop, and when she pulled up, I waved all fuckin cute like some 1950s TV show boy, like I had freckles and a middle part. I smiled at her as her red T-100 sputtered to a stop in front of me, grinning like my mouth didn’t still taste like bad coffee and Alina.

“Well, look who came to say hello.” My mother said, with a twisted look on her face. She pulled herself from the Toyota, walked up to me and the house, unlocked the door, and finished with, “C’mon, you look thin,” then made me a sandwich. Which I ate like a dog. One that hadn’t seen food this century.

After a bit of convincing on my part—I told her the condo was getting sprayed for bugs or something, she told me I could crash there for a couple of days if I went to high school while I stayed with her. I agreed, and it bought me about a week of decent dinners and some TV that wasn’t porn for a change. Alina called me and checked in a few times. My mom made her spinach eggs pretty much every morning, and I ate them even though I didn’t much care for them. I said I went to school every day, took the bus down the street from my mom’s house, had a couple laughs with my old buddy Zach, who I hadn’t seen much since I moved into Drew Dad’s condo, and skipped off over to the mall after the bus dropped me off at school.

During the hours I was supposed to be at school, I wasted most of my days hunched down in the movie theater that was close to my grandparents’ house. Pete, an older guy who had been a pro skater for a couple of years and now worked at the movie theater, would let me sit in there all day and feed me as much popcorn as I could eat. He’d always tell me I should make it work at my mom’s house, try to finish school, and go to college. He reminded me of those big paintings I did in tenth grade that my art teacher, Ms. Kachel, loved so much she sent photos of them to some contest to help kids get college scholarships. Pete reminded me I’d won the thing: a free ride to art school if I just didn’t fuck it all off. Inevitably, though, I knew it would never last back at mom’s house, back at school, trying to live a life full of other people’s rules. And you can only spend so many weeks shooting a toy laser blaster at shitty movies before you inevitably decide to see if all your friends are dead or in jail from trying to make and sell homemade MDMA. So, one day while my mom was at work, I packed up my duffel bag and hit the streets, back to Drew’s dad’s condo, back to Anal Queens 17, playing on the big screen.