THE RURALS

I’m in the passenger seat of my friend’s car on a backroad in rural Maryland. We’re both well over the legal limit, and up to no good. At this point in my life I love this feeling of reckless abandon, it is literally all that I live for. The seats are plush, it’s a police auction Crown Vic, with those comfy upholstered seats that feel nice against your back, and a bucket seat in the middle instead of a center console. It’s a roomy vehicle to say the least, and floats like a cloud, you could be hitting 100 miles per hour and not tell the difference.

As I revel in the warmth of the last few beers I chugged, and watch my friend lazily swerve from one side of the road to the other, as the brights of the headlights illuminate the way forward in the jet-black steely Maryland winter night. I laugh but can’t hear myself laugh because the music is up too loud. I pull a pack of Newport's out of my pocket and put one to my mouth, light it. Crack the window ever so slightly so as not to let the heat out. The foliage on either side of the two-way, narrow backroad jumps out at us from either side as if alive, as the head lights swerve from one side to the other, with the steering.

The party we had been to was a bonfire in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trailers. It had been a kind of bizarre night in that we didn’t stay at the party long, didn’t seem to have known many people there, and were scrambling around to get this or that drug or drink the entire time. I was happy to be on my way back with my overly intoxicated ride. My entire life was based solely upon a copious addiction to multiple substances, and a healthy dose of mental illness to self-medicate into my self-destructive holes of existence. The hopeless abandon of any responsibility or awareness of my own mortality seemed to be a welcome accompaniment to the desperate escapism that our lives all were. From party, to party in random strangers home where we stole jewelry and TV’s and liquor, to the neighborhood watering holes, clubs, the street corners of our cities and more.

I truthfully don’t have a whole lot of memory associated with the rest of the ride home beyond that we did indeed arrive back at the crib. I woke up in my bed, found my friend in the bedroom adjacent, and woke him up to the tune of “waddup fag”. This was the routine for nearly every weekend night, and the week nights if the opportunity presented itself. We were in a constant state of intoxication for years. Even when we weren’t intoxicated, the next thought was always how we were going to reach that state again.