That poor Monte Carlo. I got such a great deal on it - you could almost say it was a steal. With only forty thousand miles on it and in nearly flawless shape, it cost me 1200 dollars.

It only took me three years to completely destroy it. Well not completely - it threw a rod. I sold it to a cokehead customer at the gas station for four hundred dollars. He seemed happy about the deal and managed to get it running for about four months before the transmission locked up.

Now, I was without a car. It made little difference at first,as I was spending practically all of my time with Tracy and she drove wherever we went. Things would be trickier in a little over a month, though, when school started. I also felt bad that she always had to drive 15 minutes north of Kansas City proper, where I lived.

One evening Roy and I were roasting to a crisp inside the station. The place had two large bay windows, one facing west and one south. The west window made it especially pleasant during the summer evenings, when sun blared obnoxiously through it. There was a smaller window next to the south window. It was the perfect size for holding an air conditioner. In fact, I suspected there had been one there long ago, before Tom and Lee got hold of the place. We constantly begged Lee to put one in and he put no effort at all into concocting a lie to dodge springing for one, "It would make it too easy for people to break in."

What an insult. At least he could just tell us the truth - that he was too fucking cheap to buy a goddamn air conditioner and pay the electric bill. All the money was stored in that safe. Travis tried to lift the damn thing once and couldn't do it. It was either cemented to the structure of the building or was so heavy only a crane could lift it.

Our only weapon against the heat was to helplessly keep the door open by tying it to an eye-bolt Toad had screwed into the wall. We had a fan that efficiently sucked out hot air and replaced it with even hotter air. Our only real relief was to either go down to Amoco to buy something - which we frequently did - or sit in the ice machine. Both interfered with gas-pumping and pot-smoking, so we usually just suffered.

We had the small black and white television turned on and sitting on a chair next to the safe. I took a large gulp of fruit punch Gatorade - a drink I had become addicted to when I almost overdosed at the station that one hot day. We were watching an old rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Roy nudged my arm, "Isn't it supposed to be impossible to go the speed of light?"

He knew I loved to talk about stuff like that and would often egg me on, "Yeah, man. As far as anybody knows."

"I don't see why that is."

My brain twitched with excitement, "Well, to speed something up, you have to have energy, right?"

"Yeah."

"The thing is, that's easy to do at lower speeds. But once you start talking about speeds that are larger percentages of the speed of light, you have to use an enormous amount of energy to speed them up. In fact, the closer you get to the speed of light, the closer the amount of energy you have to use to accelerate nears infinity."

Roy eyed me suspiciously, "Why?"

"Well, when things speed up, they gain mass. Mass and energy are equivalent. So the faster something is traveling, the greater its mass. As its velocity approaches that of light, it's mass approaches infinity. In fact, you'd become so massive before you ever hit the speed of light, you'd just collapse into a black hole."

Roy looked at me with glassy eyes, "That's fucking cool."

I nodded in agreement, "Yeah. Black holes kick ass."

Our scientific interlude was interrupted by a customer. An orange Volkswagen bus pulled in on the near island, which was mine that night. I stood up to go take care of the customer.

A kid with long curly hair hopped out of the bus and scurried inside. He was eighteen or so and was wearing sandals, jeans and a t-shirt. He looked like he could have been my brother. But in fact, he was my cousin.

"Dude, what are you doing here?!"

His eyes were wild and they lit up, or flashed with some sort of bizarre psychotic energy I'd not seen before, "Darren!" He sounded as if he was surprised to see me. He just lived down the road, though it had been a few months since I saw him last. He'd never even met Tracy.

I withdrew a bit, becoming somewhat cautious. Dustin was obviously stoned out of his mind, but I couldn't tell what it was that he was on.

"I need a pack of cigarettes!" His eyes widened and he blew forcefully through pursed lips.

"No problem, man." I grabbed a pack of Marlboro reds from the cigarette machine and handed them to Dustin.

Shaking, Dustin opened the cigarettes and lit one, "Oh man, Darren..."

It sounded like he was about to tell me about some crazy thing that had just happened. It took me a few moments to realize he was just confused in general. His confusion and jitteriness gave him an air of unpredictability that made me nervous, which was crazy. All of my cousins and I had always been extremely close. At least they were with me, I guess since I was the oldest.

"So... what's going on, man?"

"Oh, man!"

I waited a bit, confirming he wasn't going to finish his sentence - or he already had finished his sentence. I couldn't be sure which.

"Yeah?"

"My mom says she talked to your mom!"

Good God! He's completely fucked out of his mind. I've seen people act more sanely on LSD!

"Dude, what are you on?"

"Ohhhhh! I did some meth. Can you tell? Am I acting fucked up or something?"

I chuckled in disbelief, "Jesus." I'd never actually seen anyone on crystal meth before.

"Okay, so what about my mom... or your mom... or whatever the fuck you're talking about?"

"Oh yeah. My mom's moving back down south. Are you wanting to move near here?"

"Yeah..."

"I wanna stay up here man! Maybe you can move in with me."

I despised the thought of living with someone else. I was a deeply private person and even having a close friend as a roommate seemed intolerable. The only person I had imagined living with, other than my mother, was Tracy. But Dustin's offer was perfectly timed. I could easily live with one of my cousins, too.

"Yeah man. That would be awesome!"

"�

Less than a month later I had moved in with Dustin. Things went pretty smoothly - we were a lot alike. My Aunt had left most of the furniture at the apartment, which was fortunate since neither Dustin nor I had much of anything. I had a bed, a dresser, a desk, a television, a computer, some clothes and Tracy. Dustin had a couple of shotguns, a blonde girlfriend who left him shortly after I moved in, a rat named Kalyptis and, much to my dismay, a considerable meth habit.

The main reason I had agreed to move in with Dustin was because I had remembered him being as hermitic as I was. That had changed significantly with his plunge into the world of pixie dust, as I came to call crystal meth.

Usually, the pixies would stay out having wild adventures in the Dustin's VW bus, or the Family Truckster. Sometimes, they'd hang out at the apartment - coming and going at all hours of the night, sweating, talking nonsensically and picking at scabs on their face.

It became a hobby for Tracy and me to watch the pixies, the way other couples may go to the park and feed the birds. They all accepted me readily, a few of them knowing me from when I was a heavy drug user. They seemed a bit nervous of Tracy though. I suspected it was because she was so beautiful. The girl really could have been a model if she'd wanted.

Eventually, there was one final addition to our chaotic home. Toad's mother-in-law had found a batch of abandoned kittens out in her barn. She was looking for a home for them and Toad and his wife took a couple. They offered me one and I ended up with a pretty calico that Tracy named Joon, after the movie Benny and Joon, which we had rented recently.

I soon discovered that Dustin's strange behavior at the station that one hot day wasn't so unusual any longer. He often went over a week with no sleep at all and I was quite certain any qualified professional would declare him to be completely insane. He managed to get himself fired from his job shortly after I moved in. We had to be extremely careful about paying rent on time, since the apartment manager was already harassing us about taking over the lease from my aunt. It was extremely easy to get Dustin hired at the station. He fit all of Toad's criteria for an employee: he was heavily into drugs.

But even with the pixies, I considered the arrangement ideal. I would have a steady ride to work - I pretty much used the Family Truckster whenever I needed -- and I was within walking distance of the station and the school. Not to mention, Tracy was now only five minutes away.

Posted by DevilMonkey at 6:05 PM

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