Recollections of a Dragon

I remember my first drink.

Nineteen… ninety? Eight? Eight. 1998.

Six of us. All boys. Piled into a flat bottom boat made for only four of us.

A motley crew of fucktards and moron garbage teens.

The sun laid its head low across the water, prostrated to my own ignorance, as the boat trolled and cast a shadow through my shoelaces resting against the belly of the rusted hull we inhabited.

I exhaled and looked above me as cigarette smoke sulked its way through the thick air. Monster claws of nicotine lazily dripped over me. Beyond that, layers of trees hung to cast dark notes that danced against the amber flakes of the metal surface by my feet.

The boys rocked the vessel by grabbing each other’s crotches, each aggressive lunge a reactive counter move against any opportunity masculine intimacy could bring. While I blocked my genitals, I would gaze across the water whispering, “Hello beautiful.” The ripples never spoke back, but I celebrated the marriage of light and liquid despite my fellow stowaways.

Perhaps I was the only kid present with a desire to see the aching details of existence. To my recollection, no one else gave a fuck.

The boat’s motor stalled and then stalled again and then stalled again and then stalled again until we rowed ourselves onto the land of some rat infested island in the middle of some rat infested pond. In the center of the property, there stood a half circle of tires arranged around a black hole of ashen logs. We stumbled and the tires greeted us with unspoken words.

“Welcome, you teenage cunts of caucasian poverty.” It said plainly, only to me. 

The tires stood as monoliths stand. Each a mysterious and geological remain that held as evidence to previous adolescent uprisings. Old DNA splatterings. Past proof of other teenage wildcats like us needing a place of solitude. 

Some of the pirate teens began to rebuild the fire within the forgotten pit. While the wood pile grew, the elder boys broke off and left with the boat to retrieve supposed girls, I was told.

“There are girls coming, retard,” I was told.

“At the south shore, retard,” I was told.

I was always the young one in the group and I was always the retard and I was always the one told and I never knew anything and I was fine with that. But what choice does the worm have with the selected apple? None. What opening in the sky is given to the weakest of these? Despite the biblical hype, again, none. The sky was a stone tablet unreadable to me without access.

I idled without identity while the fire ignited unceremoniously. Flames began to swim like baby snakes. Little white tongues grew and shifted in the pit and I noticed my previously shadowed shoelaces looking new against the rebirth of ashes. The sky began to truly set and the snake flames turned into the whorish hearth of God’s broken mouth. Thick air dripped and pooled on my upper lip while the temperature rose and I turned to my sneakers.

“I’m a fucking shoelace,” I muttered to myself.

Why not? I was also new and tied up within myself. I was also at the beginning of things without complications as I traveled across a pond to maybe do drugs and maybe hang out with girls.

Leaving my brain, I realized that around me tasks were being found.

Some dumb blonde boy pissed on an old Mountain Dew can. His hair looked dirty like mildewed hay. I could smell the pool of urine from a couple feet away. Another boy threw a big rock into a tree. “Woof!” he yelped as he threw and the limbs ruffled and then nothing.

I nodded goodbye to my shoes and joined the party. Immediately, as if waiting on me, I found a used condom and picked it up with a stick. This is what you do on an island as a boy trying to not be a boy. Rain and dirt crusted the prophylactic to make it appear as a deflated chocolate covered banana. A forgotten poo left with no true intention singing its way across the map of man and time just to find me. This was the decade of this poo. This was the decade of me discovering this poo. It was a treasure with a story. I was an anthropologist. Perhaps, this was to be the most important work of my life. To squeeze the knowledge from this milky cum filled banana into my own brain and then change. And once I changed, everything could change.

“Look,” I said waving the dirty condom which was followed by several responses from the boys about my mom or how the condom had fallen out of my butt. Somehow.

The island boys began to stir with the knowledge of the supposed girls arriving soon. It reminded me of a video I watched on my family’s computer of a hive of bees dancing in anticipation of their new queen approaching. In the segment, the group shook and shook until they blended together. I thought of running my fingers through the mesh of wings. I thought of these fuckers becoming one horrid mesh of hurt and biology. Jesus. But here, the anxious boys/bees stopped their queen dance and started to act all fucking cool and then kicked dirt around for no reason as a growing splash and a haughty laugh trumpeted across the island to proclaim the arrival of the female herd with the returning alpha chaperones. Sliding their way off the boat, the group arrived like the retired crew of the Santa Maria…all making ruin and embarrassment of their new home with every approaching step.

One dismissive boy-child near me looked to the female filled horizon and spat a long slime from his bottom lip.

We all knew why.

He spat towards the coming of the great mystery ahead. He spat towards the return of the grand vessel. He spat towards the promise of unknown spices and herbs and jewels and seeds these girls unknowingly carried in every fold of their bodies. We were ready to trade in this exotic market, yet we had nothing to barter with, which meant we had no say in the transitions to come. This would be the first of many times I would learn that lesson about women.

Regardless, the ferry arrived, tilted as it was, and time had allowed the flames of the pit to breathe wide and illuminate the graffiti scrawled across the rotting crescent circle of sitting tires. Tactful messages from previous inhabitants now displayed against the rubber. Subtle clues revealed the complex inner minds of last civilizations. Such as:

LACEY HAMILTON SUCKS COCK

or

THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN

or

SPHINX DADDY WUZ HERE

or

GOD IS A FAG

The water rippled and died across the hull of the boat and the last gaggle of girls reluctantly stepped ashore with the pensiveness of mail order brides shipped without a return address.

I’m sure looking back, that when cresting that nonsense beach, they saw the exact scenario their fathers had warned them of since childhood: A dark island conquered by beastly hormones and possessed by the male gaze. Yes, this is a father’s worst nightmare. Shadow boys haunched and armed with uncharted puberty and the core belief that they would live forever and, likely without consequences, never truly be married to their actions. 

I, on the other hand, was armed with nothing. I sat on the “cock sucking” tire defenseless to the horrors that came with the diminishment of childhood and, in my mind, the impending fate of never experiencing female interaction until one of the shadow boys handed me a malt liquor drink.

Zima? Zima. And a jolly rancher.

I stare. I’m an alien.

“You drop it in, retard,” he mouthed and kicked dirt at me.

The candy wrapper crinkled in my hand and read “WATERMELON” and I felt a pain of guilt. One, because there was something inside of me that understood that the physical manifestation of loss was at play. The victim of this loss, of course, being my life of pure sobriety, thus far. And two, because I grew up in the south and anything pertaining to watermelon always carried a distinct association to racism.

Plop.

Fizz.

Drink.

The beauty of booze is that it makes everyone a sadist.

The gummy drink burned down my throat like a sugar coated waterfall made of muted flames. Every proceeding drink scorched my organs and shifted the world into an Escher like staircase of wobble wobble wobble leaving me wondering which foot should go first should I ever be able to discern the ground before me enough to walk again.

It’s altering, isn’t it? That first drink. Something so new and fragrant and encompassing that you’re never quite prepared for it. Like nose diving into the depths of a motherly bosom that, once dove, declares you a new name. A new title that feels so much more inviting than the one you’ve known for so long. You find yourself left full and empty at the same time without an understanding or a desire to understand your new surroundings enough to propose a name to call it back.

So, you simply thank it…if you can muster the cognitive ability to do so.

And, as a newly declared sadist, you then begin to attempt to replicate this journey of the first. Until it takes the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth or the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the twentieth time to try and find that Holy Mother Bosom once again. And, eventually, you lose the journey all together.

That’s what they don’t tell you about adulthood. Clearly paved roads to pleasure end and you’re forced to forge ahead alone into the horrible wilderness…of lust. Yes, it starts with new frontiers like marriage or children or career paths or renovating houses or scaling mountains or spicier foods. But the pavement ends and the boredom of life creeps up quickly and covers your adult brain until you can taste nothing and feel nothing and will do anything to avoid the ever approaching shadow of the grave. And when the pavement turns to gravel, you will turn to the wilderness.

Call it what you want. It has many names. Divorce, abuse, drugs, depression, murder, anxiety, obsession, affairs, suicide. Some see these paths as unfortunate byproducts of the lack of self worth. I see people screaming for the chance to, again, be introduced to that new name. That new title once cherished and now forgotten. And when the wilderness ends, we smash our compasses because the instruments only point in the direction of kingdoms we have already pillaged. And, alas, all that is left before us are the cliffs of the inevitable.

The big jump. The end.

We start as tourists watching others leap. We mourn their passings with pageantry and thinly veiled wisdoms. We become learned sages with the historic tales of those who’ve dared to make the forever jump. We feign comfort with the idea of it, but all the while our collar soaks and stains in sweat. Not from fear, but from the opportunity of final titillation.

For those visiting the cliffs, we do our best to embellish this role of the story keeper and we hide our emotional nails that dig into the prospect of that one last hit that can only come from making the leap ourselves.

Eventually, we tire of keeping the score of a game started far before our time. We see our legacy fitting into the row of those gone with dust and age. We rap our knuckles and mark another goal for the great emptiness and polish the number zero for our side of humanity. And, of course, when we’ve had enough, the Great Death Monster retracts its ivory claws and opens its own version of the Holy Mother Bosom, and it gives us our final name.

Our truest name.

And when we accept that name only known in death, unnoticed, we leap from the cliffs ourselves. Old and alone, knowing there are no dark corners left for us to snort life’s ecstasy into our decayed septums.

Without ceremony, we wither. We die.

And in a predictably human fashion, we claim that it is the flesh that takes us unwillingly, but it is not. It is the soul that we cowardly push to do our bidding and snuff us out.

I digress to memory. . .

The fire rose too high for such a small island and such a small group of no ones and the tires we sat upon began to melt. Marshmallow pedestals wasting away in the presence of young boners and malt liquor.

I looked down in the amber glow to see my shoelaces were now brown and untied. This metaphor has taken a turn for the worse. I spit and my tongue was red and numb from the shit liquor and then like a ghost…a girl sat touching her knee to mine. Like puberty lightning or the sexual magnet of the universe. This moment unfolded itself with a red tongued kid and a very intentional knee touch.

Without a name, the girl greedily grabbed at my watermelon trash booze.

“You smell different than me,” I said.

She drank like a sad fish and the liquid stained her t-shirt. I kept looking at the stain while she pulled my hand onto the silver button of her pants, “What is this?” she asked.

The surface of the metal glistened. I could see the reflection of my fingernail. I took the bottle and drank again. “Your button,” I replied.

She moved my fingers down to her zipper. She asked, “What is this?” My finger ran down her crotch and the edges of her zipper felt like teeth just like all zippers feel.

“You smell different than me,” I repeated dully.

“You said that already,” she whispered and then spread her legs. Like the Second Coming of Christ. The crotch of her denim stretched like washed out bubble gum.

I remember the booze stirring in my gut like an old witch with a spoon while I watched the fibers of her pants pull against themselves. There was a ripping in my lower intestine, which up until then, was a virgin farmland classically watered with soda or grape juice now flooded with a poisonous sour mess. I exhaled through my nose.

She moved my hand again into unfamiliar fleshy territory. My armpits were sweating and I knew I stunk and I knew this girl had done this before… which was fine. But she wanted me to know she had done this before and I hated that. I hated everything about that. I never needed to discover a brand new continent, but I could have done without the goddamn tour guide winking at me the entire trip.

When she put my fingers inside of her, she grunted, “What is this?”

“It feels like a mouth,” I said.

When I threw up into the fire, the flames rose above my head.

I remember the chorus of boys surrounding me. 

They shouted that I was a dragon.