Memoir of a Passed Life

The beaches are much rockier around Lake Erie. I had become used to the smooth sand where I was from. Here, it doesn’t look much like sand as I knew it. Just tiny rocks like fat grains of salt and pepper abandoned long ago from their shakers---forgotten
garnish for the dead fish that wash up behind the house. And you always know it because, come sunrise, you smell shit from outside. Luckily, we shut the house up on the days it was offensively cold, which, for a good part of the year, was every day. The weather didn’t matter much to me---frigid, humid, plague of locusts---I couldn’t really tell the difference. My folks always kept me in until recently while my older brother is usually out fucking the idiot females of Angola. They think he has a “sexy mouth” and his truck means he’s big too. I think they’re a bunch of whores. I’m five years younger, but I even notice the girls in my grade; they‘re all the same: sluts. And the only reason they’re not whores is because they haven’t yet realized men will pay to sleep with them.

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My parents are hippies. Of course they look completely normal now.
But two days ago I found out that they used to send me to my grandparents’ so they could bake weed brownies and see Jefferson Airplane. With that said, I remember a time this past fall with my best friend Andrew (most of my friends are boys.) We were tripping mushrooms near the boat docks by Lakeside and Coolidge, just a slingshot from the house. The weather was bearable and the tide was low, so you could see a lot more dead fish sloshing in the brown water. That day we had already run out on a bill at the diner off highway 90 and been kicked out of the drug store for dropping f-bombs on some old people. It was late afternoon and we were higher than we thought was possible. We lied on the beach for hours and I couldn’t stop touching and eating and talking about the sand. Every grain meant something. All were moving in unison---the whole beach throbbed. That’s when I came up with the salt-and-pepper thing, while ranting, so I kept it. That’s about all we do most times: look out towards the Canada side and think of pseudo-intellectual things to say. Inflate ourselves with hot air along a cold beach, secretly hoping to say the words that would finally filter the world for us to plainly understand.

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But we lived in silent Technicolor. Once, on St. Patty’s, we kissed. But we never talked about it. Once, the day after he found his dad hanging in the garage, he showed me the long redness down his arm. But I never told anyone. We knew we could take on
the world. But we never once said it to each other.