Last Friday I ended up in a crappy bar called Coachhouse instead of helping with the garage project or going to the car demolitions. Coachhouse is a place people go to find a fuck or a fight. The music was typical top 40 garbage and early 90's rap, and I couldn't get into it. I think I'm just an uptight prick who can't loosen up, relax, and have fun, but I can't help it if I find the humpty-hump retarded and refuse to dance to it. My problem is that I still live in the same area that I grew up in, and everybody left are those who went straight into labor or attend the local community college for lack of ambition. Good luck finding a conversation.

Let me tell you of two brothers I know, Joe and Rich. Joe is the older of the two, 27, and right now he's doing well, working in construction with his father. Joe spent about a year in jail for retail theft. Joe had a big heroin problem. For a while it was just a bad habit, but once he got a needle it became a cliffjumper of a problem. After his folks kicked him out he borrowed a tent from me and lived in the forest strip along the highway which was opposite my front door at the time. Joe would have his girlfriend pull up at the dock doors of a Best Buy, Circuit City, or the like, and he'd run through grabbing the most valuable electronics he could carry and dash out the back exit with it before the employees or security could catch up. When you need a fix, you can run really fast. He got to the point where he'd go score and shoot up on the way home, and one day he nodded out and crashed his Z-28 into the median. (I think it's Z-28, I know fuck all about cars) The cops took him away.

Joe is a much kinder, friendlier human being than his little brother. Rich is a violent person who loves to cause major injuries to people, especially his 'friends.' He's built and stacked, like Paul Bunyan, except without the ox. I always gave him a cigarette when he asked. I like having teeth. Rich has gone to jail for assault, possesion of a firearm, auto theft, possesion of an illegal substance, and possibly other charges as well.

A few years ago I asked my buddy D to hook up some coke for a weekend bender. (although with coke we all know it's a one-night bender, you do that shit until it's gone, believe you me) D came with Rich to pick me up and we went to this woman Anna's condo. Anna's fuckpal went to go score with my $100, and while he was gone D told me that he ordered crack. I was a little bit upset, since I wanted cocaine, but what's done is done so what-the-fuck-ever. When the goods came back, Rich got mad. He's a cracksmoking virtuoso, and he knew that what I had before me was about a $40 bag. He saw that Anna had hooked up, and based on the raccoon bags under her eyes, she'd used my money to do it. She looked like she was jonesing bad and probably broke. He grabbed the crack from her, violently, and she attacked him with her fingernails. He reached out with his arm and pushed her back, and she fell over the table and knocked her head on the tv set. As we left, she stood at the door, screaming obscenities into her neighborhood at 2 in the morning. D, Rich and I went and got rocked.

This was after the Union station hobo experience, and it was equally unnerving. That put me off crack forever, although I knew better all along. What can I say, the suburbs are boring.

Nowadays Rich is rail-thin and not nearly as formidable. He caught the same heroin bug his older brother did, except he has no consience or guilt and does not care whether his parents are happy or not. That's too bad, because they're both very nice people who feed me well whenever I visit. I don't know how they can handle all this crap from their sons.

Here's another good one: When Joe was doing horse, one night he decided to make a bomb. I cannot venture a guess regarding his purpose, but he made the front page of the newspaper the next day. He was packing sulphur match heads into a lead pipe with a screwdriver, and it sparked and ignited and almost blew his thumb off. His hand is still fucked up. He put a hole through his bedroom floor and the ceiling of the den below. Fortunately this was before 9/11, or he'd have been in deep shit and labelled as a terrorist. I'm glad Joe is behaving these days.
6:58 PM - Bottle Rocket Fire Alarm