Boy Alone by Karl Taro Greenfeld

Author:Karl Taro Greenfeld [Greenfeld, Karl Taro]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061878732
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

65.

These are the years my friends and I accelerate our experimentation with drugs. For most of us, this exploration is at first tentative, a few joints, pipe loads, some beer, maybe some Southern Comfort stolen from our parents’ liquor cabinets. And then there are those who more aggressively investigate illicit substances, a few associates of mine who seem to have an absolute knack for finding, procuring, and ingesting drugs that, at the age of fourteen, I have yet to hear spoken of out loud. We embrace marijuana eagerly, promising, as it does, an initiation into a subculture that seems to extend everywhere, from album covers to Skateboarder magazine to FM radio stations.

My friend Jonathan, the goofy foot skateboarder with blond hair, the boy given to quoting Black Sabbath lyrics, takes me one afternoon to see another friend, Giancarlo, whose older sister, Jeannie, is famous locally, though for what, exactly, I am never quite sure. Giancarlo is one of those boys who seems to go from playing with toy soldiers to injecting Demerol over the course of one summer. When we were friends in elementary school, he was as obsessed with HO-scale army men as I was (and am, in fact, still). We would ride bikes to the hobby shop together to select boxes of Airfix 1/72-scale soldiers and Minitank 1/85-scale tanks and then set them up in his backyard, making engine and cannon fire noises as we did so.

His older sister, Jeannie, a physically precocious brunette who seemed to date guys in their twenties when she was thirteen, didn’t pay much attention except to make fun of us for still listening to Elton John. She liked, if I recall, Peter Frampton and then began telling us about Led Zeppelin. I didn’t see Giancarlo much over the summer before junior high school, and we drifted out of our friendship as happens easily at that age. Now, in ninth grade, he has become a local legend for his drug use and, according to Jonathan, his procurement of a firearm.

His parents, of course, are never home.

The top half of the front door is open and Cheap Trick is blaring from the living room stereo. Giancarlo waves at us as we come in and sit down on the leather sofa, our skateboards leaning against the couch.

He is shirtless, with his unevenly cut brown hair hanging down to his shoulders. It is strange how someone you were friends with just three years ago can suddenly seem like a completely different person. Giancarlo now has that aura of teenage cool that can make a local kid seem practically like a rock star. He no longer acknowledges our old friendship, our formerly shared mutual fondness for army men; his mystique is built on his hard-core drug use. I have heard the stories, breathlessly relayed by Jonathan, about Giancarlo scoring liquid Valium, about Demerol, Mandrax, quaaludes. Jonathan says he has taken some of these pills at Giancarlo’s, and among the stoner kids more inclined to straight up criminality—Bryn,

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