Like a Dog. Tara Jepsen
try to imagine what he looks like to someone who didn’t grow up with him. What he looked like to people in prison. I guess one of the guards called him “Babyface” because he has good skin. He should look like Keith Richards but instead, he looks like a Gerber baby. His eyes look like they’ve changed shape subtly. When he was using, they were cloudier, harder to read. As I say that, I realize it’s pretty pedantic. An easy interpretation. Maybe it’s muscular. Maybe different choices or ways of living can affect your face’s layout. Something your eye measures instinctively: distances between features, proportion.
“Was there another spot around here?”
“Kevin told me about another one in Landers.”
“Let’s go.”
We arrive in a cul-de-sac, and park down the street from the house. My brother waits in the car and I go to the front door. I knock, and hear someone shuffling around inside. A lady cracks the door open, probably in her fifties. A teenage boy stands behind her, trying to get a look at me.
“Hola,” I say. “Hay una piscina vacía aquí?”
“Sí,” she says.
“Nos permitiría patinarla?” I ask. My Spanish is rough, but close enough. This pool has been going for years, so I know it’s an easy get. I take out twenty dollars and hand it to her.
“Sí, pase, pase,” she says. I signal to my brother, and she closes the door. We go to the gate at the side of the house. The wood is jagged and weather-worn. I pull on the handle and the gate scrapes heavily across the pavement. I open it just far enough to enter, and my brother follows, closing the gate behind him. We walk down an alley strewn with broken toys, random sun-bleached kitchen appliances, and weeds. We find an egg-shaped pool. It’s white with two rows of square, cerulean blue tile at the top. Just past the pool, the ocean of garbage continues. Broken bicycles, garbage cans, broken grills, a stroller, a couple vacuum cleaners, some faded cardboard boxes, a wheelchair, and much more abandoned miscellany. I walk around the perimeter of the empty pool and look down the sides at the transition, which is fairly generous. Peter tries out a scum line. I feel in more harmony with him than I have in years. When he’s using, he’s so awful to be around.
I don’t know when exactly Peter started messing around with drugs, and I doubt I would have found it notable at the time. I did all the teenage lite recreational ding-dongery a person can do: smoking weed, the occasional acid, blackout drinking. I don’t think it was abnormal for our age. I remember finding Peter on the floor in our upstairs bathroom one time, shivering. He had on red soccer shorts and no shirt. He looked like your average teen novel character who would have dated a popular girl. I asked him what was going on and he said to call an ambulance, so I did. I remember feeling very scared. It’s one of the only memories I have of not paving over my feelings and staying removed from him. It feels raw and embarrassing to think of caring about him so openly. Like that kind of feeling would isolate me, because who would join me on my soft island or even acknowledge that it’s on the map? No one in my home.
I didn’t find out what the EMTs said about Peter that time. Maybe they just said he was dehydrated? I don’t think it was too long after that that he went camping with my parents and I stayed behind in the house. I was supposed to go with them but he was always more of a team player than me and I felt grossed out by whatever trashy car camping we would do, and the false gestures of familial connection. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a chair scrape in the kitchen, and then some kind of movement down the hallway in Peter’s bedroom. I was terrified. But I also had to pee. Which I would think would have been overruled by fear. But my ability to compartmentalize was at dissociative, mafia levels. So I walked to the bathroom. The noises stopped. I peed. I went back to bed and willed myself back to sleep with all of my powers of denial. A crushing fist to the heightened animal response within me.
The next morning, I remember feeling uncertain if anything had happened, or if I had dreamt it. This was my go-to mental state for any experience. A self-imposed, cloudy stoner policy that was easier than truth and clarity. I looked around and couldn’t find anything that stood out, until I found the broken handle of the back door. When Peter got home with my parents on Sunday night I told them, and Peter ran to his room. They had stolen his video game console, some cash he had lying around, and anything else they could find with a modicum of value. They did not touch the rest of the house. I asked him who the people were and he just said they were dudes in a motorcycle club. He didn’t tell me why they broke in, or how they knew what room to target, but later, I found out he was selling dope for them, and owed them money.
That same year I knew a guy who tried to commit suicide. He was also in a motorcycle club, which used to be called a gang, but is now a club, because maybe Yacht Club people are Yacht Gang people. He developed a big crush on me. I met him through a friend, and we visited him a few times. He was in his 20s, and he wanted to take me to my prom. It made me uncomfortable, and we stopped visiting him.
Peter didn’t become an addict in his own right until a couple years later, after we had both moved to San Francisco. I think I noticed it when he was in his early twenties. That’s when he became a real creep. At holiday dinners he would criticize the food in an angry, low voice. A voice you would use to confront your abuser if you were drunk and saw them alone in a park at midnight. He would do the same thing whenever music or TV was on. There was nothing he couldn’t hate with the force of a radicalized suburban kid building bombs for a terrorist operation. My parents would never ask him to leave, never insist he stop, just shake their heads and keep eating. There were three okay people at the table and one big, dark, hairy anus person. We were supposed to eat with that sharp, hostile energy shooting off of him. I could never do it. If I dated someone, Peter hated them. I don’t miss that time.
Peter skips through the shallow end, then lines up a backside line over the death box. I am so amped from his run that I juice it a little harder than I had been before, and go frontside over the light, but come out farther than I expected, and clip my front wheel on the bottom step of the ladder. I fly off my board and land really hard on my left hip, whacking my head quickly. I lie on the bottom of the pool for a minute and groan. Once he can tell I’m truly hurt, Peter walks down to help me. He grabs my hand and helps me pull myself upright. He puts his arm around my back and walks me to the stairs. I sit down.
“Do we need to go?” Peter asks.
“Just give me a few minutes,” I say, with my head in my hands.
“Did you hit your head?”
“Yeah.”
“You should ice it,” he says. “I’m sure I can find a plastic bag around here and dig some ice out of the cooler.”
Peter puts a bunch of ice into a dirty plastic grocery bag, and I sit holding it to the left side of my head. At least I didn’t hit my frontal lobe. Years ago, I saw an episode of Oprah and this girl was the passenger in a car her boyfriend was driving. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, and when they were rear-ended she flew out the front windshield and landed on the pavement, absorbing the impact with her forehead. She sustained significant damage to her frontal lobe, and then spent her life trying to have sex with her family members. They got her into playing guitar, which I’m sure was just to distract her from doing the number one best grossest thing of all time: trying to get in your parents’ pants. That story is the only thing that makes me even slightly consider wearing a helmet. But I don’t want to. I like the feeling of the air in my hair. That’s it. I don’t have a reason beyond that, and all evidence points to the fact that I should wear one. But I don’t.
That night, Peter and I sit around our fire and he cooks dinner. We have a small wireless speaker playing a book on tape from my phone. We’re listening to The Lovely Bones again. It’s our third time. He really loves this book. He gave it to my mom last Christmas. You would never guess this was Peter’s favorite book just by looking at him. You might think he’s more likely to have a favorite bong (which he did) (but now it’s mine). I really like The Lovely Bones too, but I like the movie even more.
I want a beer but Peter says it’s a bad idea since I probably have a concussion. He wants me to set my