It was three guys from Second Platoon who had fucked his mom, three guys from Second Platoon who had run a train on her. People talked shit to him about that. But Arnold was alright. “She made them wear condoms,” he said.
Then we went over to Iraq. And then some other shit happened and whatever. Soon it was July. And Arnold got killed in July. It wasn’t long after he had come back from midtour leave. I remember because he had chlamydia and gonorrhea at the time. He had caught the chlamydia off a girl at Camp Liberty when he’d been on his way home, and he’d given it to his wife when he had got there, and his wife had given him the gonorrhea, or it was the other way around. Anyway. He was driving a Bradley out on Route Martha one night and he ran over an antitank mine, which killed him instantly. I wasn’t there. I had been across the way on Route Polk then. But Shoo had been there and he told me how it had been fucked up because Arnold was a mess. Shoo said he’d looked down into the driver hatch and it was so bad he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
Thus Arnold was a great guy and everybody said as much. Which was odd since there had been a lot of people wanting to beat the fuck out of him, and I’ll tell you why: Arnold wanted to be a computer genius. He used to say he was going to bring down Bill Gates. Those were his exact words: bring down Bill Gates. That’s what he used to say he was going to do. And he came up with a computer virus, for practice, I guess. This was when there was an insatiable demand for fuck videos, and Arnold put together a massive file of that shit—gang bangs, barely legal, cum shots, anal, ass to mouth, lesbians, bukkake, MILFs, humiliation—and he got his virus on there one way or another and went around talking up this big porno file he had and he got some guys to download it off him and those guys shared it with other guys and soon all the computers began to crash and the computers were forever worthless after that. Nothing could be done for the computers. So a lot of people wanted to beat the fuck out of Arnold. But nobody did. Then he got killed and they said he was good. And maybe if I had got killed I’d have always been good.
But I’m forgetting…
* * *
—
I WAS waiting in the parking lot at the Walgreens. Black drove up and he parked and he got into my car. He fronted me 2 grams.
He was wearing a new tracksuit.
Adidas.
Yellow on purple.
I said to him, “Cool tracksuit.”
He said, “It is, right?”
He was happy about his tracksuit and it was an alright tracksuit and we pretended like we were friends. But we weren’t friends. I was just a dope fiend as far as he cared. And for my part, if I ever knew a better way to get heroin, I’d just as soon not see him again.
I said, “You hear from Raul yet?”
He said he had.
“How is he?”
“He’s good.”
“Tell him what’s up for me, will you.”
“I will.”
“This makes it six, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What about that other thing we were talking about? You still want to do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s good.”
“Alright. I’ll call you.”
I took Warrensville back. I went into the house quietly and went upstairs quietly and sat down on the edge of the bed, beside Emily. She stirred and murmured. I leaned over and kissed her ear.
“Guess what.”
“What.”
“I just saw Black.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess what else.”
“What else.”
“He’s bought himself a new tracksuit.”
“So?”
“So it’s purple with yellow stripes and he really likes it a lot.”
She rolled over and I pressed the bag of heroin into the palm of her hand.
“Care to weigh it out?”
“Mm-mm.”
“You don’t have to do it now on my account,” I said. “We can wait till later if you want to go back to sleep.”
“No,” she said. “You go ahead and weigh it out. I’ll be down in a second. I have to pee.”
“I love you.”
“Mmm. I love you too.”
I went downstairs and split up the dope. It was three light. Never mind. I’d get it back. I put a shot together. There was hope for me yet. Life was good when you were cooking up a shot of dope; in those moments every dope boy in the world was your friend and you didn’t think about the things you’d done wrong and fucked up, the years you’d wasted. I put the needle in my arm. The needle was dull so it pushed the vein away when it was going in. But the vein couldn’t run forever. I felt a little pop and my blood flashed in the rig. I sent it home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It was fall of 2013. I was twenty-eight years old and I’d been locked up about two and a half years by then. I got a letter from Matthew Johnson. He had read an article about me being a criminal and he wanted to introduce himself and he sent me a five-dollar money order and asked me to write him back. So I wrote him back and said thanks for the five dollars and yeah it sucks being in prison but I’ll be alright. He sent me some books to read. One of the books was a collection of Barry Hannah stories. He asked me to call him and I did and he asked what I thought of the books and I said I liked the Barry Hannah book the best. Looking back now, I think this thing with the Barry Hannah book was a test, and I’d passed. And Matthew sent me some more books and one of them was Hill William by Scott McClanahan, and I said that I liked that one the best and Matthew said maybe I ought to try and write a book. He said he and his friend Gian were publishers. They were called Tyrant Books. And I said I really appreciated all the books but I didn’t think I’d be able to write a whole book. A little story, a poem maybe I could handle, but a long-ass book…
Anyway he talked me into it. I started working on the fucker that February. I sent Matthew some pages. He said they were good and send some more. I did. He said keep going. Then I sent him some more pages and he said, Alright, everything you’ve sent up to now was horrible but these last pages aren’t so bad and maybe we can do this.
Two and a half years went by. The book wasn’t done yet. We had about two-thirds of a manuscript. I didn’t know how the fuck I was gonna finish it. Things had got so bad I could tell that Matthew couldn’t think about the fucking manuscript without getting depressed real bad.
Enter Josh Polikov.
Josh was working for Matthew and Matthew said to him, Yer gonna help me with this.
So he and Josh were going through it and Josh found some old pages I’d written that actually weren’t terrible and he showed them to Matthew and Matthew agreed that they weren’t actually terrible and Matthew sent them to me and said, Do something with these.
And that’s how I finished the manuscript.
We still weren’t done, not even close.
The manuscript wasn’t so much a manuscript as it was a plastic bin full of paper. Every page had been rewritten one hundred times over. There was no Word file. It had all been done on a typewriter. Any given page, sometimes the first version was the best, sometimes the seventy-ninth; and Gian DiTrapano was supposed to edit this shit and turn it into an actual coherent thing. Which somehow he did. And he did such a good fucking job of it that Tim O’Connell from Knopf thought it’d be a good idea to buy the publishing rights to the manuscript from Tyrant. This was in February 2017, about exactly three years since we started.
We still weren’t fucking done.