Status Updates From Dead Boys: Stories

I’m full to bursting and empty at the same time, like the universe on paper.

We’re all on something or other now. A forest of beer bottles has sprouted on the coffee table. Everywhere I look, I see a guy chewing the inside of his cheeks or a girl bouncing her knee and laughing too loud. Great secrets are revealed to strangers who will forget them by morning…

…darkness tightened around me, sticky as a spider’s web. Lying in bed, I drew circles in the air with the cherry of my cigarette while every sound I’ve ever heard in my life poured through the open window at once. I chose a single thread of the clamorous snarl to concentrate on; the plashy roar of the ocean, it might have been, or teardrops striking asphalt, amplified a thousand times. My rude lullaby.

The carpet reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled perfume. I press my face into it and wait for another explosion, but there’s only this dog somewhere, putting together long and short barks into combinations reminiscent of Morse code. I imagine that I’m able to decipher the gruff pronouncements: ‘He who feeds me is a liar and a thief. His hand upon me is a curse. God sees all and does nothing.’

We can only, all of us, run so far before what we really are and what is meant to be catch up to us.

The streets down here are something else. The sun never quite reaches them over the tops of the buildings, and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost…Cheap wine, crack, lies loudly told—these are the bonfires that keep the wolves at bay.

Bank robbery is a hell of a way to get a little boost up the ladder, I know, but aren’t they always saying to go where the money is? You can make anything mean anything if you try.

Like a hard-boiled Dubliners set in Los Angeles. A bit over the top sometimes but I fw it