In Like Lloyd by Matt Armstrong

Author:Matt Armstrong [Matt Armstrong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Matt Armstrong
Published: 2023-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

I dreamt of my life in weirdly vivid detail. My dreams were usually random bits of insanity my subconscious inflicted upon my psyche, but this was different. It was clear, almost lucid like I was living my life for a second time, but in montage form.

I dreamt of my teenage self. I was that whole “good kid with good grades” type until the bullying started. Using a brain is such a faux pas in high school, and I should have known better, honestly. When the kids started calling me Hemorr-Lloyd, I decided school just sucked and proceeded to fall into the oh-so-cliched “wrong crowd.” I got involved with a typical group of misfits (rapscallions, as the old folks call them), and everything went downhill from there. It started with just smoking pot and cigarettes, sneaking peaks at stolen Playboys, then turned into misdemeanour vandalism and breaking and entering. We never had any real goals, just kids being kids, dickheads being dickheads. If we found a car parked in an alley, we simply had to throw a rock through its window. It was a compulsion. With the benefit of adulthood and hindsight, I acknowledge the fact that we, collectively, sucked.

When I was sixteen, I spent most of my afternoons in an alleyway a few streets down from the school, in the back carport owned by a friend’s uncle, which we affectionately dubbed the Smoke Shack. Not far from there was what we thought to be a haunted house. The yard was overgrown with six-foot weeds; shingles fell off the roof, and the windows were boarded. We got it in our heads one day to break in and look around, see if there was anything worth stealing while keeping an eye out for proof of paranormal activity. I won’t go too far into details, as it’s less entertaining than it sounds, but things didn’t go as planned.

We pried away a window board, smashing the glass with a brick, and triggered a silent alarm below us in the basement. No cops arrived. Just an extremely angry Survivalist, a class of people who later became known as Doomsday Preppers, came bursting into the room. Standing over six and a half feet tall, this beastly specimen was some crazed man who had shut himself off from society, waiting for the world to end by an alien invasion. Crumbs fell from his unkempt beard, tumbling down his greasy wife-beater, flying off his beer gut and bouncing off the handle of his 12-gauge shotgun, which I learned later was filled with rock salt. My buddy Simon took one directly in the back, and as he dropped screaming, the rest of us fled.

Now, at this point, I hadn’t been taking care of myself. I smoked cigarettes, significant amounts of weed, and as I looked older for my age and rarely got carded, I drank at every opportunity. I lived mainly off McDonald’s and Burger King because mom never cooked and was rarely home. I hadn’t been to

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