from “Delinquents”
Nick Rees Gardner | Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts | Madrona Books | August 2024 | 182 Pages
Delinquents
I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. I ran cars full of dope boys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida, where we picked up prescriptions of painkillers from the Fort Lauderdale pill mills to snort and shoot and sell back in Hillbilly Oz. It was immersive research, the kind people sometimes don’t come back from.
•
Dallas introduced me to Oxycontin sophomore year of undergrad. We were taking a creative writing workshop with Professor Stoneman, an exemplar of the old guard who loved his scotch and simple sentences. Stoneman praised our enthusiasm for the machismo-driven underbelly, turning a blind eye when Dallas and I passed a flask beneath the desk and slipped out of class to get high. Stoneman said that in any good story, your characters have to want something. Once they have it, that story is over.
For Dallas and me the tale began when we had the drugs, when we sniffed them from the backs of toilets in Westwood Hall. We got hooked on the stuff together, though. While I held onto my job at the campus writing center until graduation, Dallas dropped out, slummed from apartment to apartment, scraping by on his girlfriend Judy’s Cracker Barrel paycheck.
As we both dipped into addiction, I’d started to fool around with the idea of the book. At Cracker Barrel, Dallas and I ate gratis pecan pie and discussed how we could Scarface our way to the top. He wanted to be the hero of my story, called himself the King of Ohio. He said he was going to get a tattoo of the skyline on his arm and below it, I run my city. He said, You’ll write it all. Preserve our legacy.
I didn’t tell him that Westinghouse wasn’t Cleveland or Columbus, that I run this rinky-dink town would be truer. A writer doesn’t interfere with his subjects. I took notes on Dallas’s far-fetched dreams and the junkyard, Rust’s Wrecks.
Rust was rumored to have ridden in a twister all the way from Youngstown till his trailer plopped down there in the middle of Ohio. He christened the two acres Hillbilly Oz, then built a barn. The trailer park grew around him, abandoned vehicles in the field. He parted out Jeeps and Hondas in under-the-counter deals. It was Rust who let us in on the ground floor: he’d cover the expenses of the Florida trip, the medical forms and co-pays, the fuel and petty cash, all in exchange for half of our prescriptions.
And then we were off. Dallas and I broke speed limits through the cornfield-stubbled Midwest. We stopped at a Chick-fil-A in Georgia and let the grease run down our chins before we continued toward the shore. So close, but we never touched the ocean. We waited in line at the strip mall, pain clinic sign gleaming, mouths thirsty for the sustained high, a ceaseless supply, an answer to all our struggles. We alternated pilot and co-pilot, down the peninsula and back to Hillbilly Oz, pockets rattling with pain pill scripts which we’d split with Rust and blast off again.
Those were our glory days. Hope and momentum propelled us through recessions and housing crises, through breakups, deaths, wars, and other losses. I didn’t even question our precarity until the day Dallas shoved Judy down the stairs. He’d blown through all his pills and when she got on him, he slapped her. She dialed nine-one-one so Dallas pushed her. The operator questioned the gasps, then the buzz of silence on the line.
When I showed up to the Verdant Valley Villas for another carpool to the Sunshine State, I saw the lot swarmed with cops and I bounced.
•
The last conversation I ever had with Dallas, after he got out on bail, before he OD’d on fentanyl-laced stamp bags from Pittsburgh, he told me that the day he’d nearly killed Judy was the day he saw his soul. Seated at the folding table in my poor excuse for a dining room, he cried into the pecan pie I’d taken to-go, didn’t even use the fork I’d shined with a damp paper towel. The folding chairs we sat on were slanted and we kept having to right ourselves, sliding and straightening again and again. We avoided eye contact as he described his epiphany. He said, Look at this clock, and pointed to the plastic ticking disc on my apartment’s wall. He said, It’s broken. I told him it was just wrong because I hadn’t changed it for daylight savings, but he said, No. Broken. Like time itself is broken. Then he collapsed from his chair, thumped on the floor.
I admit I was a bit confused. I knew that time wasn’t real, was all too familiar with the whole time is an illusion rhetoric we stoners would wield against The Man. What Dallas meant was literal temporal failure. He said that as Judy began to tumble, his own body froze. Everything paused. He watched his soul emerge in a bloom of jellyfish, a great many-tentacled spirit. Dallas believed it was the pills that made it happen, and this jelly cloud was his true self come unbound where his bumbling body failed. The bloom is what kept Judy from death. When she lost consciousness, when her own bloom emerged, the jellies met in an electrified cloud, hummed bolts into her limp limbs to shock her, send her gasping back to life. So, really, he told me, he at once killed her and saved her, which made him no less guilty, no less a horrible person.
Reading Dallas’s obit on Facebook years later, I imagined his manifold soul above his slumped torso seizured to stillness on the couch, the cloud pouring from his mouth, failing this time to jump-start his own heart.
But when Dallas had told me all this, I figured it must have been a drug-induced hallucination. I mean, we’d all OD’d to greater or lesser degrees. We’d all projected astrally on LSD, or sleep-deprived on uppers, seen our own bodies sprawled and useless. But, after his funeral, as my tolerance increased, as I became Rust’s primary driver, his right-hand man, I began to notice I too existed in a strange temporality that couldn’t be completely blamed on delirium. I oscillated from full to empty, never lingering in between. I’d pull into Rust’s lot with my pockets bulging and shout over the sound of him welding chassis to reified beaters as he readied another jalopy for the next Florida run, and then I’d blink and be pill-less once again, in the same spot, impatient to hit the road. Then all the dope boys became interchangeable. I’d be driving to Florida with S. and W., and then, looking in the rearview, I’d find them replaced by R. and L., or Kilo and Litany. Silent and awkward or conked out with placid smiles, everyone served the same purpose. Then the Feds would crack down on Lauderdale and new clinics would crop up in other cities, in Georgia and Mississippi. But it was the same drive, the same need-fueled jut—ten, fifteen, twenty hours down from snow banks to humid warmth, a tentacled mass swapping out one dope boy for another dope boy, one landscape for another landscape. Even the color and the shape of the pills would change. The only constant was that we needed more than we could ever achieve.
At one point I was on M’s couch watching Scag and Brando inject themselves, but instead they drew the liquid out of their bodies, removed the needle from their veins, squirted the stuff back into the spoon. There were other situations too where the world worked in reverse.
We began to talk about escape.
•
I was reminded of one of Stoneman’s lectures on Story, when he said that the quotidian sometimes holds more weight than the sensational. He said, You don’t need explosions, death, violence. Write a dinner party or a walk home from the bar. But if I was writing a book about the opioid epidemic, all I had was shock, spikes of emotion connected to vague blurs.
I thought about this while I loaded up the vehicle with dope boys in front of Rust’s trailer, listening to Rust clang on metal, engines roaring deep in the field that was Rust’s Wrecks. The sounds were echoes of when that original tornado touched down. We were all waiting for a tornado. We all waited for something to move us, an act of god, prophecy, a palm full of tablets crushed and snorted, a few Speedway gas cards, a set of scrapped-together wheels. All those years as we pushed our luck, jetting off for brief glimpses of southern sunlight, Rust stayed beneath Ohio’s cloudy skies. He waited, pounded, and welded new transports for us, planned for a more expeditious getaway.
Rust was our benefactor, our mentor and guide. He’d been using opioid analogues since before Big Pharma called pain the sixth vital sign. When we returned from our trips, we’d sit around his coffee table to split our bounty, count our take, then we’d gather our individual doses and ingest. We all leaned back into the rush, the drip, the numb. I would feel awake again and everything would freeze. I’d watch the room smoke and plume, jellyfish tendrils pouring out of all of us to scatter and reconvene. A mutual loving soul.
Then one day there was Judy, Dallas’s bereaved. She stood in the kitchen wearing skintight Cracker Barrel slacks under an apron, her bare arms plump. She blamed us for Dallas’s death. I struggled up from the couch, managed my way across the floor where she slapped and scratched at me till I was close enough to hold her. The noise she made sent our blooms scrabbling back into our individual chests, reanimated all of our limbs and torsos, hearts pounding, throats gasping for answers.
She said, It’s all your fault. Which we had already accepted into that agglomerate guilt buried deep inside persistent dread. I’d added Dallas’s death to the disconnect from my parents, my grandfather’s funeral that I skipped, my wasted education, the slim hope of my book. We nodded along with Judy’s swell and bellow. She sobbed only briefly. She said, I need to understand why he’d go so far. You owe me. Which we did.
A few pills from each of us as penance, and Judy was hooked. Her own bloom rushed a circle around the room the color of pale green ocean before it charged ours and integrated. She alternately watched our souls and nodded next to me in the low spot of the couch, thigh against thigh in a way that in a more sober era would have been seductive.
•
It was Judy’s idea. She’d learned on the Discovery channel that people all over the US were building rocket ships in which they could escape the earth for some lunar commune where there was no poverty, no ongoing war, where they’d already built a bubble to filter oxygen. Rust took over the operation, employed us to scavenge sheet metal from crumpled Buicks, to swipe bolts and piping from Menards. Judy downloaded the specs from a message board. There were blueprints for the weaponry necessary to protect us from intergalactic invaders, but I think, despite our blooms, we were all doubtful that this alien life could exist, much less mean us harm. I was unsure when Judy leaned her head on my shoulder during yet another Florida trip, somewhere between Nashville and Birmingham. The guilt and want ground around the void between my empty and full. I said, Judy, wake up. Tell me a story or I’m gonna pass out. Everyone else was sleeping and there was little energy left to keep me awake. She blinked, slapped her face, and reached for my zipper.
And I wanted to put all of this on paper, the darkness and the fumble of sex, a quest narrative with a holy pill-mill grail. Judy was my maiden in distress now saved. We worked on the rocket ship all day. We slept on Rust’s guest room couch and writhed into each other in a shared sleeping bag. She gained weight off our diet of communal pizzas and Mountain Dew, but I stayed scrawny. I liked the feel of her soft belly as I wrapped an arm around her, holding her flesh so it wouldn’t slide off the cushion, hands too busy to even scribble a letter.
•
Time passed or it didn’t. This all occurred over a series of what? Five years? Less? And once it fell to pieces, I never saw any of them ever again. So, in a way, I’m younger than my birth certificate says.
At one point Rench ran off to rehab and later Scag got nabbed slinging weed. The rocket ship took form, and I banged a maroon quarter panel to a conical tip while Rust lazed on his lawn chair. He was shirtless, cave-chested. He plotted. He said he needed pictures of the clinic next time we took a southbound trip. He wanted to know where security cameras were positioned, the locations of personnel, guards, receptionists. He gave me a digital camera to snap the shots. He said, We hit this lick and it’s like a hundred thousand pills, man. You come straight back here and we blast off and there ain’t no laws on the moon. This was Ohio, fall, leaves scraping across gravel, squirrels scurrying to shelter with the racket of much larger beasts. Judy brought us lunch while we worked. We ate the room-temp pizza off torn corners of the greasy box. Judy crushed her pills on a detached rearview mirror, and I noticed she was up to three at once, ninety milligrams of Roxy required for a buzz. I was annoyed. I said, What’s the fucking point? We’re just gonna run out again. I wanted to tell them I knew the rocket would never make it, that we were only building to build, soldering metal to metal for the sake of shattering the static.
Rust gave me a look both wild and anxious, a fury in his eyes. He said, Something’s gonna happen. And then leaned over to vomit, a noiseless splurge into the dirt yard, and he came up laughing, tossed me the bottle of pills, an answer or at least the end of the question.
We loaded into a dinged-up Impala, Judy and me in front, Rench and Butler in the back, Litany in the middle. Judy smithereened her tablets, took the fattest line first. Then she passed around the jewel case. She chased the drugs with my Mountain Dew, turned up Tha Carter II as I idled at rest stops, ate Snickers and peanuts and left the car in cruise. Day showed us distant foggy mountains and night revealed only headlights, exit signs. We slept in the Walmart parking lot to save hotel funds. Or rather we tried to sleep, but I stayed awake while jellyfish tendrils swarmed about their bodies, dipped in and out of the cracked windows, giving and taking away. I sat on the curb weighted by humidity, then opened up my diminished stash, crushed, inhaled. The pills that remained rattled lonely. I counted and came up short until sunrise, when Butler the phlebotomist took his works into a stall and vanished for good.
•
We returned from Georgia a man short and I handed over an empty camera, no data for a bigger hit. We split our pills and dosed up and then I went on a drive alone for once, windows down and AC on. I took the country roads that Dallas and I used to roadie on, sucked down joint after careless joint.
When I found him in the Walmart bathroom, Butler’s hand dangled to the ground, and jellies flashed as I peed until the flashes stopped. That’s when I was certain. I’d counted the cameras while I power walked through the sliding doors without him. Seventeen lenses preserved my solitary escape, our car fleeing that Georgia Walmart parking lot, photoless, Butlerless, failed. The questions that Judy and Kilo and Litany posed floated with our blooms, obscured my view all the way to the clinic and beyond, clouded the twelve-hour drive back to Hillbilly Oz and Rust’s Wrecks.
It was only a matter of time before we were caught. We’d all been so set on American Gangstering our trip to riches that we’d missed the fact that life had swiped us by. I took the county highway to the interstate and for the first time in forever I cried over everything that had ended. Then I pulled over to the shoulder and did more pills. I headed back to work on the capsule, anything that would propel us far from earth.
When I pulled in the drive, Litany was painting the scavenged decklid armor with anime characters and graffitied empowerments—thrive, hope, love. I complimented her on the art, the colors, the way the blue dripped weirdly on the slick surface, but I also noted that it would all burn off once the capsule broke the atmosphere to which she said, I’m not stupid. I know we aren’t going anywhere. It will blow apart before it breaks the ozone layer.
The crooked cone I’d banged out of rusted metal tapered down into a pod outfitted with dirty pilot seats sewn with extra belts and buckles. It weighed over a ton which was actually quite light considering its size, the components used. Along with her favorite heroes and positive words, Litany dedicated an entire panel to a jellyfish bloom, the mutual life force prepared to shock the dead back into being. In her painting, the bloom emerged from a pile of pills to alter time and space, to make room for flying saucers. And seeing those pills, their possibilities, I realized there is no knowing the truth until we try it, and once we’ve tried the truth it becomes malleable. Altered.
As we prepped the tanks, checked the hoses, I thought of the moment of flight. I imagined how Judy would take my hand while we counted down: Ten. Nine. Eight. At five I would snort a couple pills from a busted shard of glass. We would all snort, inject, smoke. We would need to be in the right headspace for this to work, to get high enough, as in up into the sky, to float in communion with Kilo, our lone and intrepid test pilot. I imagined Judy’s large hand, how it would crush mine as she’d make a fist around my fingers while working up a vein. How she’d plunge the needle in, shoot four pills at once. We would all have upped our tolerances, pushing for the perfect high. Then back to the countdown: Three! Two! One! And there would be a sputter, a combustion too soon stifled. The bloom would pour out, surround the ship, an electric storm of our jellyfish lightning, tentacles stinging the craft into a rumble then a hum. It would all happen like magic, and we’d applaud as the capsule rose, fire shooting from every rocket, grass roasted to char. We’d have to back up. It would be marvelous, the spacecraft rising, Kilo rising, the jellyfish bloom rising all as one. And the chains would begin to snap from the ground and as we rushed to grab them, to secure the vessel, we would also lift upward, rise from the earth. And all of that need, all that desire, would leave us with the heave of the rocket ship which would be the result of our own drive to vanish in the firmament. People talk about the search for meaning, of higher powers and ascension, but have they ever felt it? We would feel it. We would leave like Dallas and Butler and Brando and Scag and all the others. It would be wonderful, will be wonderful, to grip the chain in one hand, Judy’s fist in the other, and blast off into the sky.
From Delinquents by Nick Rees Gardner.
Copyright © 2024 Nick Reese Gardner.
Reprinted with permission of Madrona Books.