The Dirty Kids – Part Two (of Seven)

Spencer and Sal had known each other for as long as either could remember, but had only been friends since middle school.  Spencer grew up in a subdivision of well-manicured lawns and streets named after wildflowers. Sal lived across the thoroughfare, on a block populated by run-down apartment buildings and small, five-room houses with weed-choked lawns strewn with broken plastic toys and battered lawn furniture. 

As a child, Sal was part of a pack of kids Spencer’s mother, an inveterate snob, would always call “The Dirty Kids,” and the name stuck in Spencer’s head. The Dirty Kids were a loose association of kids ranging from seven to thirteen with a sort of rotating membership. New faces were constantly replacing kids who moved away, never to be seen again, when their parents got laid off, evicted, or separated.  The only interactions between the Dirty Kids and the kids from Spencer’s neighborhood—children of teachers, accountants, nurses—were at the local playground where they played heated basketball games in which the losers had to vacate the court. Sal was an instigator in those days. On occasions when the Dirty Kids lost, he’d push over bikes or hurl dirt clods onto the court. Spencer came to regard him with a mixture of wariness and loathing.  

But then in seventh grade, Spencer and Sal both tested into the magnet school across town. Spencer’s bus stop was one stop before Sal’s and on the second week of class, Sal spotted Spencer in the back row of the bus reading a Stephen King book. Sal plopped down next to Spencer and asked him, “You like that scary shit?” Without waiting for an answer, Sal started in on a long story he claimed to have heard in Catechism class about a child who denounced God, only to find the Devil perched on the edge of his bed that night, leading to the boy’s tearful repentance. Spencer soon started looking forward to Sal’s weekly reports from the front lines of God’s war with the Devil: an Irish setter possessed by Satan, once-kind eyes glowing red with the power of Hell’s fury; or about the kid that intoned “I love Bloody Mary” into the mirror thirteen times and then dropped dead, a victim of an otherworldly demon that lived on the other side of the glass. It was never clear to Spencer whether these stories had been officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church. But Sal’s delivery was compelling enough that his tales would inspire a little thrill of the uncanny to shudder through Spencer’s body. 

The stories ended in eighth grade, after Sal’s father skipped town. Soon Sal was inking “Hail Satan” in Sharpie onto his battered Chuck Taylors and wearing heavy metal t-shirts sporting pentagrams and inverted crosses. By then, Sal and Spencer were inseparable, sitting in the backs of their classes together exchanging sardonic smirks, and sharing their adolescent enthusiasms–the Beat Generation, Wu-Tang Clan, marijuana—as if the two of them shared a single mind.  But after high school, they went their separate ways: Sal to his abortive stint in the army, and Spencer to the State University. Spencer discovered the recreational use of Robitussin during his second semester there and soon found himself robotripping multiple times a week. He stopped going to class mid-semester and failed three of his four classes.

Spencer returned home from his first year of college and took a summer job at his father’s car dealership. Once his report card came home, his father warned him that another fuckup like that would mean that he’d have to move back home and work there for good. After spending a few months cleaning out trade-ins his father bought for re-sale—fossilized bits of fast food, pebble-like spheres of chewing gum, and snot-hardened wads of Kleenex—that prospect seemed to Spencer like living death.

For Spencer, the only silver lining to being back for the summer was that he got to reconnect with Sal. After work, he’d meet Sal at the old playground for pickup basketball games with other kids from their graduating class. A few times a week, after it got too dark to hoop anymore, the two of them would each drink a four-ounce bottle of Robitussin. Then they’d drive out to what once was the heart of their hometown, but now was the fraying edge, where once-proud factories now lay abandoned. They sagged with age and neglect, and Spencer thought they looked like they were collapsing into themselves, like fallen and decomposing gods. Spencer and Sal would wander about the industrial necropolis, looking to gain entrance through broken windows, or by bending back portions of warped plywood covering up empty doorways. They would step into the cool and damp interiors that carried a faint smell of rot and urine, then stomp around for hours through the decay, tripping on Robitussin and smoking weed. 

The night before Spencer returned to college, they crept into an old machine tool shop. Everything of value had been long ago stripped away, the walls torn open for the piping and wires. The only sign of habitation came in the form of empty beer bottles, shattered crack vials, discarded needles, and blackened spoons. Spencer shined the light from his phone across the wreckage. “My dad told me that my great, great grandfather came here from Sweden, just to work in these factories.” He kicked an empty bottle of malt liquor. “Now this place is so dead even the junkies are gone.”

Sal exhaled marijuana smoke and laughed as he passed the joint to Spencer. “All the junkies except for us.” 

Spencer returned to school at the end of the summer with good intentions. He found an efficiency apartment off campus, diligently went to class, and ignored texts and social media messages from the stoners he knew from his old dorm building. But a few weeks into the semester, he felt bored and isolated, and began robotripping again. Soon he stopped going to class and would go to campus only under the cover of nightfall, fearing run-ins with classmates or old friends from the dorm. He’d spent the last month in a sort of limbo state, not eating or sleeping regularly. The days ran together, and he spent most of his time during the day drinking coffee and reading Patricia Highsmith novels at the Townie library close to his efficiency. Then at night, he would wander the edges of campus like a ghost until the sun came up. Then he’d try to get a few hours of sleep, and start the whole cycle over again.

He hadn’t heard a word from Sal that semester until Homecoming Day at around 6 PM, when he came home from another day spent drinking coffee and reading at the library, and found an empty 4-ounce bottle of Robitussin perched on the doorknob to his apartment.  He smiled as he fingered the bottle of Robitussin, then entered his apartment and waited for his friend to show up at his door.