pepperandeuphoria

[pepperandeuphoria]

8

Eugene had driven 20 minutes at 3 a.m to reach his ex-wife’s house because of an emergency. One of his children, Joyce, had overdosed on Adderall and she was being revived by paramedics. He wanted to be there. There was a good chance she wouldn’t come back. He wanted to be there when she died. After his youngest, Sharice, was born, the freshness of his marriage had run its course, and he was finding himself caring far more about the money in his business than about his family life. When Sharice was 1, and a bit easier to take care of, (and after he stuck it in his favorite barista) he skipped. But that was a long time ago. He’s not the same man he was in his 40s. He didn’t want to make endless money pulling oil out of the Permian Basin, he wanted his family back. But they didn’t want him back. The only reason they even called to tell him what was going on was so he could see his daughter one more time before she died, they wanted to make sure that he was there for that at least.

They had Joyce out on a stretcher when he pulled up, they were running her to an ambulance. They had to stop for a moment, however, as Joyce had begun seizing and vomiting, a violent combination. The paramedics allowed her to finish seizing as one held an AED in case she went under. Once the seizing was done, they flipped her on her side and drained the vomit from her mouth, trying to clear the airway and allow her to breath. While they did this, they checked her pulse, somewhat relieved to find it. She was not breathing however, and was choking on her vomit. The paramedics continued to care for her and clear her airway, but in the meantime Joyce’s mother, Ariel, was sobbing uncontrollably on the curb, being comforted by the rest of her daughters, who were all leaned over her and trying to make her feel better. 

That was the moment he arrived, pulling up alongside the curve of the cul de sac, a large square in a circle hole. He stepped out of the car, a stranger to his daughters, his head having balded and his beard grown out long. He wore tall boots and a 40 gallon hat, and behaved as if he were a cowboy rather than an oil baron. He placed his hat over his chest and approached his family. 

Ariel saw her ex-husband standing over her, and looked up at him. She felt an intense rush of shame. She said, “yeah, I guess things have been hard since you left, Eugene. The kids are all addicts now. I just didn’t think it would be Joyce that I lost first.” She began sobbing again, as her children rubbed her shoulders. “You can talk to the paramedics if you want to see her. She hasn’t seen you since she was a baby girl. It might make her stronger to see you. She’s not conscious anymore but maybe it’ll help.” Her voice broke. 

Sharon and Sharice came up to their father’s side. They just looked up at him in amazement. Like Santa Claus. 

Eugene didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. He just looked at her, broken on the curb like a thrown-out piece of furniture. When he came to his senses, he walked up to one of the paramedics and asked to ride with them to the hospital. Since it was just him and not the 5 other family members that lived with her, they let him on, and took off.

[pepperandeuphoria]

7

Neziz and Jenine had picked up Mikey on their way home from the party. He was in the back seat, staring at his missing leg, which his mother said was the only thing he did anymore. “It hurts a lot,” he said, “even though it’s not there anymore I can still feel it. I can feel the tissue dying even though it’s in the hospital in the medical waste bin.”

“That sounds terrifying,” replied Neziz. Jenine said nothing because she was passed out in the back seat. Mikey and Neziz were trying to stay awake on the road, hoping they could get back before 4 a.m, even though Grapevine was still a good 3 hours away. Neziz’s eyes had a thin ceramic glaze covering them.

“What have you heard about it, Neziz?” Mikey asked.

“Well, I mean I’ve heard some stuff. Do you really wanna talk about it?” 

“No one will talk to me about it. They all just want me to forget about it. As if I could.”

“I’ve heard one thing. Did you text Kenny Larson that you were going to kill yourself before you did it?”

Mikey stared at the passing headlights. He remembered when he used to live with his mom full time, back when he was a teenager, and driving this stretch just to hang out with Neziz and Jenine. “Yeah,” he said, “when I started to feel the tracks vibrate I texted him. You know, he ruined my life.”

“Did he?” Neziz replied, getting into the same old argument she has a hundred times, “I mean, it was really that injury wasn’t it?”

“He caused that injury. Before the game he wore down the cleats with sandpaper so I would slip easier. That fucking game. Did you hear that I caught him with my gear before the game? He wanted my spot on the team and the coach wouldn’t let him because he knew I was better than that fucking flatfoot Kenny Larson.” Mikey’s chest heaved. 

Neziz didn’t reply to this and changed the subject, “So what have you been doing since you got out of surgery?”

Mikey sat and looked at the street signs passing. He thought for a second about whether or not he should keep talking or if he even wanted to be in the car anymore. Eventually he replied, “I guess not much. I’ve got a wheelchair now. I mostly just sit in the wheelchair and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I’m under like suicide watch at my house. My mom hid all the knives and my dad came and picked up all his old guns and ammo so I can’t use them anymore. To be honest there’s not much to do there. I get drunk. I do that a lot. But I did that a lot before too.”

“I’m sorry so much shit is going on,” Neziz said to him. She couldn’t understand the last few things he said, she was dozing to a Shitkid track. 

“It’s not your fault. I guess maybe I shouldn’t talk about it so much. Maybe I should try and just forget about it. Try and move on.”

“Maybe. Does talking about it make you feel better?”

“No.”

[pepperandeuphoria]

6

Sharon and Sharice didn’t spend much time upstairs. They stuck around in the smoking room. There was a carpet couch and a white rug stained gray on the floor. Sharon was taking a hit of the joint they were sharing, which was rolled with delta 8 flower they got from a local no-card smoke shop. Sharon began to remark “I don’t know how I lived before I got high.”

“Yeah,” Sharice replied, “I feel you.”

Sharon passed the joint to her sister, “It really just makes everything make that much more sense. I feel like my brain is a disease and weed is the medicine.”

“Yeah,” Sharice replied, “I feel you.”

“I feel like no one else understands me, you know, like that I need this shit to make my brain function,” Sharon continued.

“Yeah,” Sharice replied, “I feel you.”

“You’re really easy to talk to,” Sharon said.

“Yeah,” Sharice replied, flashing a grin. Her eyes blinked in cold slits. 

Sharon got the joint back from her sister and began to smoke it again. “I wonder how Neziz is doing. Do you think she’s gonna move out soon? I feel like she’s only staying nowadays because she doesn’t want me to get her room. Like, I know she knows I want her room, it’s obvious that I want her room, I’ve wanted her room since I was like 10 or something. But she’s just such a bitch that she wants to keep it from me. And she’s always going on about work and shit. Like, I get it, you don’t want to work, but maybe like, you have to? Like maybe it’s a thing you just gotta fucking do. But that’s just an excuse. Really she just wants that fucking room and she doesn’t wanna give it to me because she’s had it out for my whole life. God, I swear I could just fucking kill her sometimes. But I know how that would hurt Jenine. And mom probably. Even though mom probably hates her more than I do by this point.”

“Yeah,” Sharice replied, “she’s a real bitch sometimes.” Sharice felt that feeling in her chest again.

Sharon passed the joint back to her sister and the two of them sat back in the couch. The walls were painted orange and there was a slow haze which encapsulated the room. It moved only to accept more of itself, a self-replicating organism. 

There was a small window at the top of the north wall in the smoking room and although it was covered in fogged glass, Sharon was just barely able to see flashing blue and red lights. 

“Shit,” Sharon said,” we gotta smell proof quick. Hide this shit. The fucking cops are here.” 

Sharon and Sharice scrambled to hide the shit they had in their room, and they heard the rush of footsteps upstairs.

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[pepperandeuphoria]

5

Joyce was feeling paranoid in her room, which was on the second story. Her walls were coated with the hottest of pinks and covered in various art pieces which spelled out the way that she felt throughout the years. Mostly paintings of flowers and landscapes, she appreciated the complexity of flowers. As she looked down she saw the work put before her. A study sheet,  for her precalculus final, which was to take place in a couple of days, and beside it, her Adderall. She opened the box of pills and inside there were none. She closed it again. 

She checked the locks on her door and her windows and made sure there was no chance that her isolation could be broken, and then she checked the box again. Still nothing. She got out her phone and began looking at Snapchat, which was her preferred method of getting more pills. She hadn’t had one all day and it was getting a little hard for her to focus. She texted her dealer, Rufio, and waited for a response. While she was waiting she checked the pill box again. Still nothing. 

Rufio responded complaining about the late hour that she was asking him to deliver. He said he would do it, but only if he got a $10 delivery fee in return. Joyce agreed and Rufio was on his way. 

Outside Joyce’s window was a slanted roof which gave way to a sort of pathway that could be taken to the ground. It was a dangerous way to have the house set up when they were kids, but it was very convenient now that she used it to sneak out. She saw Rufio’s car at the gate and unlocked the window. She grabbed $110 and put it in her back pocket, and opened up her window, climbing out and making her way to the ground, where she would begin to run toward Rufio and open the gate. She got in the passenger seat of his car and held the money in her hand. The deal was made and she went back to her room. 

She dumped the bag of pills into her box, took out three, and began crushing them. She didn’t bother to look at the dosage of the pills before beginning her routine. She crushed them up in a dime bag that she’d been using and reusing for 2 years now, which was coated all throughout the inside with a fine particulate that couldn’t be retrieved except with water. She dumped the powder out onto a hand mirror and snorted it using a piece of a plastic straw. 

She began to study with her newfound energy. She was starting to get better at making her graphs, which was good because that’s kind of what calculus is all about. She was finished with the tenth problem when she decided that she’d reward herself with more Adderall.

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[pepperandeuphoria]

4

It was a little later into the night when the party was set to start, around 10. It was this abandoned house with a big lake in the back. People fished there all the time, the land was essentially under public ownership. Any attempt to sell the land was met with local resistance, which would inevitably lead to the new occupants leaving quickly. Teenagers can be really nasty in the sticks, and people tend to grow attached somewhat to the land they frequent. This place was a 3 minute gravel driveway off the highway, a few lights and a sign sat there on the corner to let you know there was something there.

Jenine stepped out of the truck and her sister met her side before they entered the property. Neziz said, “I remember the last time we were here. It was out first road trip, remember?”

“No,” Jenine replied, “that was El Paso. How do you confuse little Lockhart with big El Paso, Neziz?”

“Oh,” Neziz continued, “I don’t know, my memory ain’t like it was in high school you know.”

They moved toward a light by the lake. There were maybe 10 or 20 people there, most of the jocks from the local highschool, they were throwing around a football and smoking Marlboro reds. They wouldn’t dare put another brand to their lips, they were still chasing the masculinity that their parents told them about, and a lot of them became fascinated with the Marlboro cowboy from the old commercials. They were drinking Jack, there was a van with some people in it, sitting under one of those streetlights with a slouch and playing music.

Neziz took the lead and walked up to the van, her hair flowing in the wind and her converse occasionally failing to find footing amongst the mud, and her arms dangled lazily to her sides. Jenine was barely trudging along behind her, tired from the heat.

The jocks were caught up in some sort of pissing contest on how hard one could make a football fly, so they walked right past their little game of football. A close look at one of them revealed to Jenine that they were likely on meth. She recalled the first and only time she smoked meth, but the memory was a haze that was easy for her to break through as she stepped up into the van.

It didn’t have any seats in the back and the floor was covered with a multicolored, circular rug, and there were 4 people already in it. When Neziz and Jenine found their seats next to Clarice, the van became full.

Jenine met Clarice when she went on a field trip in 6th grade. Clarice was from San Antonio, and her hair had white streaks running through it. Jenine complimented her and that was it. They never stopped talking, but they hung out a lot less than they used to. Clarice invited them to this party.

Someone had brought a bong, which is really just customary, and you could smoke out of it, but that wasn’t what everyone wanted to do. They wanted to snort fuckin oxycontin. Some kind of fervor gripped them in their pursuit of the drug, full bottles of pills would be stolen or bought or scammed from local towns and freaks. Jenine was here for it. In the middle of the circle was a small mirror used to sort lines, and there were plastic bags with pills to be crushed waiting for the hammer.

It was a neat little setup.

Neziz had a cigarette between her lips, a short one that popped a menthol pod in the filter. As she smoked, she drew the attention of the other people in the van, who began to want their own cigarettes. A pack was taken out of a pocket and tossed lazily into the center, luckily not hitting the mirror, as it was being held by Jenine.

Clarice took one out of the pack and lit it. “How was the drive,” she asked.

“Hot,” Jenine replied.

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[pepperandeuphoria]

3

Something about being in Lockhart always made Neziz and Jenine feel uneasy. The town was too old, full of people that would call the cops if you lit a joint. They didn’t sell bottled sodas at any of the restaurants either, and everything had to have meat in it. That last part was really only a thing for Jenine, she was the one who cared about glass bottles, and she hadn’t eaten meat since senior year. It was hot that day in April, when they were set to find a party at an old lakehouse. They had driven nearly 4 hours by then and they were gonna be there before nightfall, however, so that meant it was time for gas and red bull. The station was in an ugly part of town, where concrete was the only thing you could really see, greenery off in the distance. 

They sat with the A/C blaring and the truck’s windows all rolled up, they had a slight tint to them but it wasn’t enough. Neziz got out the sun visor to block out more of the heat, and that seemed to help. Jenine was feeling pretty tired and cold since she hadn’t been smoking, so she cracked a window a little bit and lit a cigarette, sharing it with her sister. 

Neziz said, “did you hear that shit Mikey pulled out on the rails?”

“I did,” Jenine replied, “I heard from Sharon. Apparently he texted Kenny Larson about it before he did it.”

“Kenny Larson?” Neziz asked, perplexed, “You mean Kenny Larson, the NFL player? The one who got on the Cowboys? Football star Kenny Larson?”

“Yeah, he texted some people about it, ended up in some tabloids. Sharon told me about it”

“Goddamn,” Neziz exclaimed.

“Yeah and Sharon is usually a lot more grounded than Sharice so it’s not like she was making it up. I saw the paper.”

“No I ain’t sayin’ you’re lying. I believe it. Mikey went off the rails after Junior year. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make a joke there. I just mean, like, he stopped being himself after he got injured at that game.”

“Yeah, no, I know what you mean,” Jenine replied, “you know something? I think his game was actually near here. Like wasn’t it in Lockhart? Or am I high? I mean I’m high, but…”

“Yeah, no, he was in Waco, remember. We kept making jokes about the Branch Davidians and we thought that was why he got hurt.” “Oh yeah,” Jenine said, “didn’t we try peyote too?”

“Yeah, we did. Come to think of it, that was probably the cause of his injury.”

“Do you think we should visit him, see how he’s doing?”

“Sure,” Neziz replied.

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[pepperandeuphoria]

2

Mikey woke up in the hospital alone in the night. It was dark and there was a bed on either side of him. His leg hurt bad, he’d fallen out of bed. The heart rate monitor was screaming for help, and after a couple of seconds he heard the footsteps of the nurse running down the hallway. He came in and turned on the light, and helped Mikey back into bed. Mikey looked at his leg and wondered how it still hurt. He could feel the part that was missing. He could feel it, and he let the nurse know he could. He said, “please, just put me out of my misery. I can still feel it. It’s gone but I can feel it. It hurts. Please. I don’t want to live.”

The nurse laid him down on the bed and Mikey was taken back to when the train hit him. He saw the lights of the train passing, and the white that covered his vision when the train ran him over. Mikey, who was once on the football team, who was once the pride of the town. Who tore a ligament in his leg and could never play again. Who never really made it out of high school. Mikey, the loser who danced with a train.

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[pepperandeuphoria]

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Pepper & Euphoria is a novel I started work on when I graduated high school a couple of years ago. The chapters are all very short and the book itself is pretty easy to get through, and I finished work on it a few months ago. Currently, I am in the process of editing it, and due to the short nature of the chapters, I thought it would be perfect for a daily serialized post series here on tumblr dot com :)

I am releasing this for free because I honestly don't see me actually getting published at any point in the near future and at least this way people might read it.

Read the first chapter here: 1

[pepperandeuphoria]

1

Mikey lit a cigarette and sat down on the tracks. The beer in his hand was half empty and warm, and his lips were covered in burns. The light of the city failed to crawl to the tracks, and the air was still.

The train blared its horn and slowed as it crossed the road, and as it passed it regained speed. The conductor was going steady down the dark line, he sat back a bit in his chair, and prepared himself for the next crossing. 

Mikey smoked his cigarette and lied down on the tracks. His legs were sticking out of his shorts and resting on the metal, which vibrated not terribly unlike a massage chair. Mikey drank his beer and got out his phone. He texted Kenny Larson from fifth period English and told him he was suicidal. Kenny was already asleep. 

Mikey saw the train coming from the light and the whistle, and he stood up and got himself ready. He was gonna prove that he was a man. He was gonna have no fear. He was gonna stand in front of the train. He hopped from one rail to the other, jumping like a little kid walking home, moving toward the train. 

Mikey slipped and landed sideways, off to his left, and when the train came, it only took his leg. 

Mikey screamed from the pain, and the train slowed down. When it came to a stop, the conductor came out with a couple of other people and they all rushed around him with flashlights. He blacked out after hearing one of them yell, “Jesus fuck his leg is clean off!”

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