“I’ve said, ‘OK, I hope somebody will manifest,’ but nobody has,” Dawn Julian said. “I’m convinced, probably because I want to be, that it’s a woman playing tricks because I call the building an Old Dame.”

The night before Father’s Day I ingest two jelly tabs and smoke an eighth of weed. Jelly tabs are apparently derivatives of heroin. Before this I regularly consume LSD, pot, booze, cigarettes, Robitussin when things fall through, pills, hash and snuff.


I turn 19 and my roommate scores jellies. We close our eyes and that was it. The overhead lights in Wilson Farms are an exaggeration, Twinkies are eternity, and the cashier Lamar cashes us out without making eye contact, one head phone blushes his ear and the other, angles directly against the customer. We walk proudly along street shoulders, arms pretending falcons. Tony is there, this big fucking tank of dumb flesh, slightly too intelligent for use. Gordon is there after twenty years of carrying fat and he has decided to get in shape carrying five pounds in each hand wherever we go.

We go to the movies that night and watch Clerks in the old Amherst theater where they wear old timey film house attire. I get Reese’s Pieces and sit in the middle back. Dante is trying too hard.

That night I sleep one inch above my sheets with my eyes open. I go the bathroom several times because I think I have to shit but I realize it’s an itch that begins in my asshole and turns inward so that I want to scratch my liver with a wooden spoon.

That morning is Father’s Day. Jasmine and I break up over the telephone. We both cry because we don’t know what else to say.

That night I go to my parent’s house and my father cooks steak and drinks scotch. My mother yells, “Steven” in a pleasingly embarrassed authoritative tone when he walks up behind her doing the dishes and rattles her breasts from behind, while my brother’s and I clear the table.