Jail (fictional memoir)

Young, Loaded and Out of Control (told in 1st and 3rd person)

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash

The guy yelled and rushed me, slamming my body with surprising force into the cell bars. My back jacked up against the cold hard metal. We fell together onto the nasty floor, which stunk of piss, and grappled. I yelled for help. He was on top of me. Then slowly, somehow, I got on top of him. I punched him in the face, hard, twice. Then he twisted his legs and amazingly got me back on the ground again.

Then a door swung open and a cop ran in screeching at us. He unlocked the cell and rushed in, separating us and standing as a wall between us. The man was bleeding from the nose. He tried to rush me again and the cop pulled his billy and bapped the guy hard on the back. He went down.

Combing his unruly hair back into place, the cop said, “I don’t want to hear any more bullshit. Enough. Hear me?”

We both nodded.

~

In the deep fall of 2002—only mere months after [barely] graduating from high school—I got a DUI and landed in the drunk-tank for about 16 hours.

A girl from school—Bethany Miller—threw a wild party at her house (her parents were out of town) up in Santa Paula, off Highway 150, the winding, twisting narrow backcountry road leading from Ojai, where I lived and had grown up, high into the mountains.

I was 18 and drinking a lot. I’d been expelled three weeks prior to senior graduation for possession of pot and booze and only due to my English teacher and my parents had the school relented and decided to hand me my diploma after the summer on the sole condition that I complete a three-month-long outpatient rehab program, which I did.

And yet here I was again, already chasing the dragon.

I was still living with my parents but would leave only months after this incident. I was on the precipice of something, adulthood in some sense, and I think I felt that intrinsically. It was like I’d been climbing a rugged, lonely mountain all my life and was finally, at last, about to reach the snow-covered peak. There would be many more, much higher mountains to climb, I grasped that, but this was the highest I’d ever been. The air was thinner here. I felt alive and adrenalated and shocked all at once. Where had my innocent boyhood gone, shafted along side my kind, thoughtful nature as a child? Sophomore year, being introduced to punk rock, drinking and girls, I’d begun to metamorphose into some sort of animal.

My folks went to bed that night around 9pm. At 9:30, I snuck out—not that I needed to “sneak out,” but I was trying to avoid a confrontation—and slid into my olive-green 1998 Volvo, that familiar stink of leather and the hanging lemon. I’d parked down the block to avoid noise. This was the biggest party of our lives and I wasn’t going to miss it. A knot of fear and anxiety sat in my solar plexus, because I’d never been cool, though I’d always had a reputation: Part tough-guy, part-asshole, part-rebel, part clown. Everyone, of course, knew about my expulsion. I’d been the only student not at the graduation ceremony. Mom had nearly had a nervous breakdown; she’d locked herself in her room for a week, my father gently knocking on the bedroom door and bringing in her meals. I felt terrible about all of it, but, since the first drink sophomore year, it had felt out of my hands. Some bigger, more sinister source pulled my psychological strings like some sort of celestial puppet-master.

It was late September, still relatively warm out in Southern California, so I rolled my windows down and let the thick nighttime air rush in, rustling my hair. I wore my old beat-up leather punk jacket—silver studs here and there—tight blue jeans and high-top Cons. I was still punk. Social Distortion—one of my all-time favorite early 80s LA punk bands—was playing low-volume; I’d been playing the CD earlier. As I drove north along East Ojai Ave, I pulled out my Lucky Strikes, extracted one, lit it with the blue bic, and inhaled, blowing smoke out the window. The smoke disappeared quickly as if some demon shadow on the lonely night road. No other cars were around. Empty.

Up, up the snaking Highway 150 I went, the harsh, sharp curves making my stomach pulse each time. The cliffs were high and sharp and dangerous. I always had that strange existential desire to veer straight off one of those sheer cliffs. Why not? Take life into my own hands. End things. Eradicate consciousness. Cease life.

But instead I listened to the pumping music, drove too fast along those curves, feeling them organically like a woman’s smooth body in bed. I turned up the volume. For no reason, around one of the craziest turns I flipped my headlights off: My vascular system intensified and my adrenaline shot up like a rocket leaving the stratosphere. I grinned like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. That was me back then: I lived for adrenaline. Risk. Danger. Fatalism. Existentialism. Choice. I wanted to poke the belly of the beast that was The Edge, like Hunter S. Thompson had written about in his 1966 book, Hell’s Angels, when describing doing 100 MPH on his motorcycle with no helmet on Great Highway in 1960s San Francisco. I’d always chased that kind of death-tickle high.

Up and up and up until the road finally flattened out and widened and ran along those long, open green fields, black now in the night. Suddenly it felt like I was driving along at night in Ohio or Nebraska or somewhere like that. Nothingness everywhere. The void. I passed farms and sporadic homes. Speeding past Sulphur Mountain Road I recalled my old best friend Craig, one of my closest friends in pre-teen childhood. Craig had lived up here all his life until we split off at high school, another one of those crossroads you hit in youth. High school was one of the most intense divergences for many people. Different directions. I remembered the big shabby two-story farmhouse Craig and his single mother lived in. Feeding their three horses, the chickens. Sitting on the back seat of Craig’s Yamaha motorcycle, arms clutching his chest, as he took us for a scary, thrilling ride along the muddy, uneven hills surrounding their house. The one time Craig showed me, up in those same mysterious hills, his secret stash of Hustler.

And then I was closing in on the party. I didn’t know the exact address, but I’d been there once before and I remembered. The house was literally right off 150, and there was a big circular driveway with a chestnut tree in the center. On the left side.

*

Walking in I saw how packed the party was. There must have been 150 people, easy. It was loud, The Chronic Album playing, Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre rapping up a feisty storm. The music mixed in with the loud, monotonous chattering noise of yapping voices. People sat on the couches, stood around in the living room and the kitchen, everyone holding one or two big red plastic cups. I saw a keg across the room. Bookshelves rose up, filled with tomes. I remembered that Bethany’s parents were both college professors, one of English Lit and the other of Ancient Greek Mythology. They both taught at UCSB.

I recognized many in the sea of smiling, laughing faces, of course. Most seemed to ignore me but a few eyes caught my figure. I tried to avoid people’s gazes. Rare, I was stone cold sober.

I walked into the kitchen and saw several of the cool kid jocks from school. Darren Templeton, Roger Jones, Tommy Riller, and a gaggle of girls giggling about who knows what. I snatched a red plastic cup and pumped beer from the second keg, in the kitchen.

“So, the Punk King deigns to show his presence,” a gruff male voice said behind me. My back was facing him.

I turned. It was Roger Jones. Jones was three inches taller than me and six months younger. He wore loose, baggy jeans, a black Billabong T-shirt, and a red beanie, thick blond tufts of hair protruding out the front, back and sides. He looked like exactly what he was: A football-playing, surfer jock. Typical asshole. Drove one of those massive lifted GMC trucks with the flow-master to make it sound louder. Jones was the epitome of everything I hated.

I shrugged, slurping beer. It tasted like Pabst Blue Ribbon. “What can I say? I ain’t a follower like you, Roger.”

His two buddies smiled, laughter erupting from them like dastardly sonic lava. “Ohhhh, shit! You gonna let him get away with that, Jones?”

Jones smiled, glugging his beer down to the end.

“Go get me a refill, Faggot,” he said to me.

The room went deathly silent. We stood ten feet apart. Between us was a small kitchen island. The adrenaline returned, pummeling my insecurity. I finished my beer in one deep, brutal glug. Burped, loudly. Grinned demonically. I stepped to the keg, filled my own beer again, and faced Jones.

“Go fuck yourself, Chief.”