When I was 12- 13 years old, and full of newly discovered angst, my long, shimmering hair framing my Dave Koresh silver glasses, my icewashed denim jacket, when I still thought happiness might exist inside the hermetic, over the clothes fumbling paradise of the all night skate or church lock in, when I still played records backwards with serious intent, I met a like minded individual named George Cookingham. We spent a lot of time in cemeteries, deserted lots, basements We rode bikes and set shit on fire. It was fucking awesome. We roamed the Illinois dusk, drank bum wine in cornfields, ate asthma pills,At George’s birthday party, we drank purloined liquor, listened to Iron maiden, and let off 22 caliber handgun rounds in his basement. We zapped each other with a stun gun. We smoked enormous leaf joints and never got high. It was fucking awesome.
We had, funnily enough, a similar interest in the occult, in medieval demonology and heavy metal.. He was my science partner in seventh grade science, and we built a working Kirlian photography machine, which used high voltage electricity to take photographs of auras,or the soul. We flunked anyway, because George’s father died in the middle of our project, and we did not show up to the science fair. I kept the machine for years, till I didn’t. We played with ouija boards that said George would die at 16, me at 23. We smoked the flowers from his father’s funeral arrangement. We drank the baileys under the sink. Our friend Rich was hit by a train, and had his heart jump started and came back to life. We spread a pentagram of blood on a mirror and chanted into the dark ‘SHEMHAMAFORASH, AVE SATANAS’ until the mirror went liquid and
The dark, or the mirror, or his giant whitte dog claimed the blood. It was there, until it wasn't.
We sat under train trestles and let the trains run over us, like a rattling apocalypse. We jumped trains and rode them into town to watch metal cover bands and have circle pits in a gravel parking lot.. We huffed gas and listened to Slayer and Grim Reaper and Maiden and Black Sabbath. It was fucking awesome. We set more shit on fire. George was placed in a mental institution and escaped, and lived in a rotting trailer in my back yard. We walked the train tracks into the wheat and corn fields, and got drunk in a field of fireflies.
We got roaring drunk on Cisco and George kicked a bunch of mailboxes until a gigantic motherfucker came out and held a pistol to my head. We stole peoples mail. We stole from cemeteries, and came once, at night, to find an unearthed casket sitting in the middle of the gravel drive. We did not open it. Another time, i got the shit kicked out of me in a graveyard by some other gigantic motherfucker. We threw shit at cars with burned out headlights and ran from them through the alleys, laughing. We set dumpsters on fire and put stolen parts on our bikes..
We ran around abandoned houses till the fire department burned them down. My grandfather died and we drank his whiskey. We set bonfires as big as houses that roared for entire days. We took speed. We huffed paint and white out, we got driven out to the middle of a cornfield with a dude who had two cases of beer and he took his cock out and i thought he might kill us there, but he just apologetically masturbated in the field while George was passed out and I sat in the passenger seat with a torn beer can in my hand.
We lit fires in the wood and howled.
One night, George stole his mothers car, and came to see me, wrapped the car around a tree. drove a stop sign post through the tree. He walked the half mile to my house, threw gravel at my window and whispered my name through blood flecked lips. His lung had collapsed. I woke my father who took him to the hospital. The car was totalled. glass cubes from the windshield melted into the tar road for years.
We argued, fell out over a girl. I moved away. I called him once to get a phone number, in the middle of the night, and found at the age of sixteen his heart had stopped at an intersection, his truck had hit a pole and George had been dead for two months when I called.
This is my story, the blood flecked mirror, the black and white picture of a soul, that was there, until it wasn't.
rue prophecy of an arcade quija board, the lack of the voice in the other end of the line
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