“Remus? You reckon there’s any point to us saving her some of this?”

            The two of us were perched on Diff the Dick’s beer-stank kitchen counter, passing a forty of some malt liquor brand we’d never heard of back and forth and looking for all the world like a couple of miserable clown portraits. Somebody should’ve painted us on velvet, sold us at their crazy aunt’s rubbish sale.

            “If you think she’s ever gonna get her ass back here,” he murmered, taking a large swig and peering all around the kitchen and out the open window behind us, head hung and eyes rolling up over his glasses, into his eyebrows like some damned scholarly psychopath. “Wouldn’t put it past her not to, though.”

            Remus in his wrinkled tweed suit, right hand forever in his pocket. Me in the dusty striped sweater I thought looked very French Film Star but turned out to be just hot as hell and I hadn’t worn a t-shirt underneath and it itched like I had scabies and you know what? That wouldn’t have surprised me. I didn’t consort with the cleanest of characters. I mean for Godsakes, had Remus ever dry-cleaned his tweeds since taking up this…this elegant tramp look last summer? And Shipwreck with those horrible rainboots! I made the mistake once of fake-lunging at them like I was going to force them off her and—well, she made a very solid argument against such behavior, screaming and kicking like a wounded rabbit. Probably fucked up the probability of me ever multiplying my genius on this earth. Not like anybody was giving me the time of day or whatnot. Nothing close looking to manifest that way here, neither.

            Music in the next room slurred shitty goodtimes through the walls.  Something with harmonicas, punk rock screaming, drunk-girl voices clawing high like cats and drunk dudes bellowing from the bass of their meaty guts. Five minutes, ten minutes, all songs congealing into the devil’s pep-rally and what the hell was keeping Shipwreck from scoring more liquid sanity off one of these poor rednecks?   Even though she was sort of messy and wore weird clothes with patches and things she’d made out of costumes she stole from the Drama Club’s storage room and grandma’s thriftstore lingerie and she dyed her hair with packets of grape Kool Aid and permanent markers and she’d never worn anything but rainboots smelling vaguely of—houseboat, which necessarily implies fish but somehow I never noticed or maybe I got used to it. But anyway, all that and she was still sort of, I don’t know, sexy and could get even jock-necks and uptowners and police officers and dock workers—well, the male ones or the lesbians, mostly—to do things for her or let her off the hook or whatever the hell she wanted.

***

            “Satchel, how the hell is it that being this drunk can’t help make a bad time decent? There ought to be some kind of law,” proposed Remus into the shallows of a paper cup he’d just fished out of a bowl of pretzel residue. When I didn’t answer he added, “Fuck it, I’m writing one!”

            But he didn’t. He just sat there, glowering in his worn tweed overcoat. Finally he was moved enough to crumple the cup in his fist and chuck it out the window, where colorguard girls or some such things were synchronized slip-n’-sliding in tight jeans and bras. Giggling and shivering cause they were idiots and it was 30 degrees outside.

            “Good Lord Satchel, those things could cut through glass. How’s this fucking people you don’t know thing work, anyhow?”

***

            An hour later and she still hadn’t showed. So we fell off the counter and in with Diff the Dick and his crew, his topless Dodge Dart commanding the long-awaited second run to the only store crooked enough to buy Diff being a thirty-two year old guy who looked sort of Mexican in his picture. Pidge Fieldman’s knees cinched my head-rest, his fat head thrusting up and out into the cold wind to catapult tone-deaf renditions of Sex Pistols songs at men in bathrobes hovering at their windows. I tried to punch at Pidge’s fat gut falling all over me but it wasn’t easy with my head forced up into the dashboard by all these freshman punkrock girls piled on the laps of metalhead druggies and all squealing for more room and eeeeee don’t drop your joint on my skirt and cough cough and change the music and we like KillMeKillMe and Diff’s crazy driving was taking every bump hard and my face was bouncing and banging and  turning colors from the goddamned, hiked-up floor heater.

            On the way back we forced Pidge to ride in the trunk and I moved to the back and a metalhead and a punkrock girl moved up front and started making out and big-boned Majorie the dykiest one of course sat on my lap and then Remus was just about sitting on her lap, trying to protect his blasted right hand from getting squashed against the door. Meanwhile, all our boxed wine was roasting on the floor up front beneath the Chucks and the combat boots.

            “Dude! My feet are cold.”                          

            “My spit’s gonna be colder than this wine, you asshole!”

***

            And it was, but we poured ourselves big cups nonetheless and Pidge tried to strap a box to himself thinking girls would like a human wine dispenser but I tricked him by saying nobody’s gonna to be impressed with your piss-warm beer and they’ll blame your damn girth for warming it up so he put it the two boxes in the freezer. Which was perfect because we could watch over it from our perch and hop down and refill and not have to deal with any of these idiots or rely on the good graces of that dumb fat stoner.

            Just then Kitty Teesdale, alternately known as “Titty Tease Tail,” stumbled past in a tangle of lycra tubing and evil, evil stilettos. I wondered how she could stand being dressed like that, it being the middle of winter and all. I wondered that for a while, before suddenly wondering why she was laden with about five pounds worth of bar soap. 

            “I think I’d rather enjoy being stepped on by her,” muttered Remus, removing his right hand from his pocket, looking at it, putting it back.

            “Hmmm. Strange. I thought you were going to say you’d enjoy being washed by her.”

            “Yeah…that’d be good too.”

            “Remus, have you looked at her feet?” Kitty’s feet were all mashed and fucked-looking from having been raised in stilettos. “Imagine how gross she’d be barefoot!”            

            “I can imagine her in a lot of ways, but barefoot is probably the last that comes to mind.” He was now attempting to pour himself a drink from the wine box using only his left hand. I watched his pinky fiddle with the spigot, squeezing down on it until all fingers squeezed and the plastic cup popped out of his hand and rolled onto the linoleum. After five minutes of this and him glaring at me pointedly, I sighed and snatched it away to fill myself.

            “Heard she’s got herpes…”

            “Fuck it. What else am I doing with my life?”

            “Heard she caught it from Gothor the Goth.”           

            “Uhh! I might catch too-tight pleather pants disease then! I don’t know what’s worse,” he grimaced and huffed down at his right hand, then squinted after Kitty through his over-full wine cup.

***

            Remus Van Kamp is the most dismal romantic I know—not to mention a small-time madman. Despite the fact that he was born right-handed and bred for a right-handed standard of living, for the past five years he’s forced himself to drink, eat, write, and jerk-off with his left hand. This false dexterity owed itself to a peculiar growth, just shy of the second joint on his right-hand thumb. We all used to think, including Remus himself, that this was an extra finger.  Shipwreck and I considered ourselves fairly stylish, having a six-fingered friend to claim. But after Remus got the notion that here lay the body of his barely developed, conjoined twin brother—and that it sometimes spoke to him, telepathically—we didn’t think ourselves so. More like:

            “So if ‘birds of a feather’ rings true, we’re pretty much fucked than?”

            “But I don’t feel crazy…” 

            “That just figures! Denial of craziness is the first sign of craziness.”

            Remus calls his brother Keller, on account of him being mute and whatnot. Just...fucking adorable.

***

            Our space was suddenly invaded in a clamoring of cheers and air punches. A crowd was quickly building up around the kitchen table; a flesh wall wailing at whatever it had barricaded from our view. I hopped off the counter and found several unmanned beverages, thanks to the mass hysteria of drunkards. Remus stood up on the counter to inspect the commotion. 

            “What is it?” I yelled over my shoulder, “Fucking strip thumb-wrestling again?”

            “Can’t tell…could be Wreck,” slurred Remus, slow-eyeing the scene. “Keller’s only bit of luck, being buried in my hand, is that he can’t see us getting this deep down.” He slumped back into a fetal position.

            “We’re not that deep down,” I offered weakly, now wringing out the inner pouch of boxed wine into my mouth and his.

            “If you say so,” he shrugged, drooling wine onto his chin and shirt collar. “Oh shit, look now!” Remus was gesturing mournfully towards the flesh wall, from which Tamina Myers had just wriggled out, stumbling, weeping, falling face first onto the carpet, where she proceeded to weep for the remainder of the night. There in the gap we saw Kenji and Helmut up on the table, sudsing at the mouth and clutching their bared stomachs. I was watching Tamina, wishing she’d stop blubbering. She wasn’t typically this ugly.

            Some stomp-team girl followed Tamina to the floor, where they gripped each other and wept. Of all the crappy melodrama. And then I spotted that hippy imbecile Mandolin, her beauty pooling soft and dumb as she rallied beside Helmut, nibbling his ear and cooing, handing him soap cakes to eat. Goddamn and damn. I thought she was with Gothor now, but you never can tell with hippies. And anyhow Gothor used to be called Trippy Bear because he wore tie dye and sold acid and ran around all goofy and smiling and juggling those rubber sticks with the tassels on the ends, but now he was trying really hard to look like this mysterious goth guy named Tom. So probably he dumped Mandolin ‘cause she didn’t fit his image anymore.

***

            Tom is a senior who smokes cloves in the hallways and never gets caught and has really good hair and a tan which is different and a six pack and always has on tough black jeans and scary belts with spikes and studs, and after school when it’s warm he’ll take his shirt off and, seriously, even the snotty cheerleaders with the BMWs will stare and giggle with lust. Tom is the genuine article, and he’s not even an asshole. He once let me bum a clove off him and he nodded his head when I said thanks and asked me what I was in for. I said Sophomore year, and he raised his fist and said, “Godspeed partner. Halfway there.” And then his bus came and I just thought, what a character. And you just know he’s been beaten by his alcoholic stepdads or his sister killed herself or he grew up in Russia and moved all over the place at a young age and never felt like he fit in anywhere and so developed this natural hard aloofness that makes him do thousands of crunches in his dark bedroom to Nine Inch Nails or whatnot every night.

            But Gothar, what a loser! Before he became this hippy sprite last year, I heard he wore cowboy boots and Wranglers and drove a truck with a sticker on the bumper that read, “Got Jesus?”  And now it’s covered over with “God is Dead,” and he wears black turtlenecks and black girls’ jeans and his hair is stringy and dying it black makes his face paler which makes his cold sores and acne stick out. The guy is seriously such a fucking joke.

***

            Kenji and Helmut were sudsing bigger and bigger clouds of white down their chins. The flesh wall was squealing, writhing—a hellish depiction of collective depravity.

            “That’s it!” said Remus, chucking an empty cup into the crowd, “ No more society for me!”

            “We’ve seen worse doings than this,” I replied sad-heartedly to Remus, who just kept muttering sentiments of misanthropy, nodding his head from side to side. Kitty came past again, aptly timed. She glanced at us without interest.

            “Hey! Kitty!” I had to yell at least three times. Someone had turned up the crappy drum and bass. People were bouncing around like spastics. It seemed like the whole party had moved into the kitchen.

            “Huh?” she staggered towards us, shiny all over. Remus quit muttering and just stared.

            “You haven’t seen Shipwreck around at all, have you?!”

            “Who???”

            “Shi—Sadie!!!”

            “No…sorry…heard some people talking about her stair surfing, though! I guess she plowed right over Gothar! Wanted to fight him for his turtleneck! But I haven’t seen her!” Evidently, she’d forgotten where she’d intended to go, because she turned right around and went back into the soap-eating contest.

            “What kind of bastard wears a turtleneck, anyway?”

            “Kind with a cold neck, I’d assume,” Remus answered peevishly, once he’d recovered from Kitty.

            “Are you trying to make me feel petty?”

            “Your feeling that way wouldn’t be any of my doing.” This storm cloud Remus had just strapped onto his head was starting to piss me off.

***