Originally published in Verbicide issue #10

Maybe she’d been lying to get rid of me. Ghod she was fly tho, in that blue wig and that freshy fresh speek — everything all tight and a’ight. And shit, she was tight and more than alright. She was all right — an ass that popped those hip-huggers. You could calculate pi by that bubble butt. Gimme the calipers, fuckit.

And there’d be beer, too. College kids always had beer. Kegs of it, more than likely. Sure as shit beat spanging for another 40. An unlimited supply of beer and booty awaited me at this party.

Except I couldn’t find it.

Why why why had I been that stupid? I said I knew where Fontana was, because I didn’t want to look fucking stupid, because every boy of course has to be a fucking glossary of street names and directional aptitude. Fontana was somewhere near the Circle K, I knew. It should be like the next street, but I’d been saying this the last three, four blocks and was getting increasingly pissed. The longer it took me, the greater the chance that Blue (did she say her name was Kim or Katie?) something, whatever — would be cornered by some dumb lug and the keg would be as dry at the Sahara. I was thirsty dammit. The 40 was long gone, a distant piss on the Whites’ lawn, the bottle in their mailbox. Anyone asinine enough to put their fucking name on their mailbox deserved a lot worse than that.

God, maybe Fontana went north-south and here I’d been walking parallel to it the whole time. Shit, I didn’t even know the address. Blue hadn’t known, she just liked my “Die My Darling” t-shirt. She said it was a big apartment complex called The Pointe on Fontana, apartment 223. All these dorm hotel apartments looked the same and had stupid names like The Pointe. Maybe she got it wrong and there was no Pointe.

Har har.

If I’d stayed at the Circle K, maybe I’d have enough for another 40 by now. Probably not, though. It was hard enough to spange off these tight rich kids without me being essentially young and healthy enough to get a job — a fact a lot of assholes seemed to think they ought to point out to me. But what the fuck, it kept me occupied.

There were parties at all of these places, every balcony had Barbie dolls hanging over the railings — bitches. The streets rang with stupid tittering laughter and retarded butt-for-brains frat-holes shouting stupid shit, every word out their mouth might as well be YO!

What the fuck had I been thinking? I planned to ingratiate myself with these assholes? Fuck. But I’d been trying to find the place for too long to give up now — there was no way I’d be able to scrape up enough change for another beer before the K 86’d the LQ. But the longer I wandered, the further I was sure I was from the party. The thing that pissed me off the most was that it might as well be any of these bands of assholes. I was surrounded by exactly what I was looking for but didn’t really even wait. Even the girl in the wig was irrelevant by now. She only served as my key to not getting my skinny punk ass kicked by goons who wanted the M:F ratio better than 3:1. I began to consider of walking into a random party and if anybody asked who I was, I could say, “I know … uh, this girl in a blue wig said there was a party …”

And then what? Stand out amongst these motherfuckers because I was the only person there whose clothes weren’t all bought in the last month. Fuck. Why was I doing this? Had I actually thought I could have got laid? Drunk?

There was no point — and probably no Pointe either. Why did every single fucking apartment complex around here have to have a mind bogglingly idiotic name. Stone Harbor? We were five hundred miles from the ocean. Why were people so stupid?

That stupid bitch. She’d been lying and now I was going to end up spending half the night looking for some apartments called The Pointe that doesn’t exist, because there is no Pointe. Maybe I should accost every drunk partier who crossed my path with an exhortation of “Where’s The Pointe?!?” Why not just be the asshole sticking my head into frat parties and gangsta bashes, accosting random staggering sorority babes, “I’m looking for The Pointe?”

But I guess I’m only punk as fuck when I’m drunk as fuck, and the 40 is wearing off. I’m too drained to do anything but linger mournfully at the peripheries of all these identical events, hoping for a substitute blue girl to invite me in. A female in my stead would have been invited into every one of these debacles. But here I am, so tritely, so stupidly hoping for an invite into the kind of party I’d sworn to hate, hoping for a bored girl from the suburbs who liked Sid Vicious or Black Flag or even Modest Mouse, any shit.

Pathetic.

It was all my fault. Why did I tell her I knew where Fontana was? I didn’t know where Fontana was. I was pretty sure I’d crossed it’s path before, but I didn’t know what it was or where it went. What was I expecting anyway, an awkward evening at the edges, waiting patiently while coolguy filled everyone’s cup from the keg but mine? Fucking shit. Having the choice between dogging Blue or just standing around. I really think I could have had a chance with her, though. Blue sounded like she hated these assholes as much as I did. Maybe she’d want to slum and we could spange together. Shit, if she did the asking, we could rake it in.

But that chance was long passed.

So here I was, fucked at my chance for anything at all. Why did everything always suck? Fuck it. Even Blue didn’t matter to me by this point. All I wanted was a place to be. If I’d been invited into any of the pads I’d passed, I would have abandoned Blue to the whims of whatever gathering spread its wings before me, no matter how ostracized I might have felt.

What good was any of this, anyway? Blue was long in the arms of someone even less deserving than I. She didn’t care and I didn’t care, only I didn’t do anything, when I could have done something. But what difference did it make, anyway, searching for something and not finding it, or searching for nothing and finding it right there, asleep drunk in the abandoned van behind the Circle K?

I feel like I haven’t done anything in a long time. Another night where tonight you could have done absolutely anything, and instead you did nothing again; it’s all the same, you’re sure, and anyway there’s nothing to do anyway. A chick in a wig had led me astray, fuck her. Fuck The Pointe. Fuck everything. I just wanted to go up to someone and tell them to fuck the fuck off.

There was a place on the left. A party winding down. A couple drunk buffoons in dockers and spanking bright hawaiian shirts. One of them had on oakleys even though it was fucking nighttime. The same kind of kid who called me faggot every day from a SUV cuz I always walked extra slow through the crosswalk to try to make people miss the light. They were the faggots. Their pants were pressed and pleated. They even had that faggoty sewn in cuff. Look at the two of them, all dressed up the same. Faggots. If I’m the faggot, how come you’re the ones who can’t go anywhere without your apish butt-buddies, huh? Well, fuck them.

The two kids stopped clowning and looked at me. “YO!” “What up?” chump number two explicated.

“I’m looking for The Pointe.” They look at me, puzzled. Was I really going to kiss these guys asses to see if I could come in for the tail end of some retarded party and get what, maybe one beer, before the keg was dry? Hell no! “Fucking faggots.”

And I can tell by the seconds that pass, that it had been a mellow drunk. But it registers before I realize I should run. “What did you say?” The two dudes are still in front of me. And I can see in their eyes that a silent consensus to bum rush my punk ass has been reached.

Fuck it, “I said, eat a bowl of dick up!”

I turn to dart off across the lawn, and as I do, I see Katie standing on the second floor balcony of the apartment complex these guys had come out of. I pause just long enough for the two goons to knock me over. One second I’m looking at Katie and the next, the whole world is spinning. All I see are stars. The sky as I’m bowled over, and then a different sort of star when my head hits the pavement. Oh god, why couldn’t I have made it to the lawn? And quickly these two monsters are upon me.

I take a few to the ribs and stomach, and again my panorama shifts, as I am hefted from the pavement and swung, elbows and nose bleeding — a brief flash of a sign with stupid mountains and raised lettering “THE POINTE” — before I am let go and the stars spin through the sky again.

I crash land in Hefty trashbags, and the smell of rotten chicken hits me. A metal corner of something has put a good sized gash in my thigh and ripped my jeans in a way that’s going to need fixing. I’m sore all over.

Fuck.

One of them is yelling at me from outside the dumpster. “Fucking faggot!”

“Fuck him.”

“Fucking fuck!” He kicks the metal. “Fuck him. Let’s take a piss on him.”

“Nah, fuck him.”

SLAM!

Darkness and chicken.