I let my head thump back against the wall above my bed and look around. There’s no bed frame, no headboard. Just the queen mattress and a box spring on the floor. I don’t bother with sheets, either. Just a thin blanket over the mattress, and another to cover up if I’m cold. No dresser, either, just a big silver laundry basket with my clean clothes in it, folded, and two black contractor-size garbage bags full of dirty clothes. A bookshelf, filled with novels, mainly sci-fi and fantasy, and several dozen volumes of math texts. Some are textbooks bought for cheap on Amazon, high school and college algebra and physics and calculus. Others are more esoteric, books on quantum physics and string theory and the history of numbers, kabbalah, Sudoku, logic, statistics, books on the relationship between math and chess, and between math and music. The only other thing I own is a battered third-hand Fender Stratocaster, a twenty-year-old amp, and an off-brand pair of over-the-ear headphones.
They are the belongings of a nomad. They’ll all fit in the bed of Mom’s rusted-out Dodge Ram, and the tiny trailer that she bought in Biloxi. Her room looks about the same, although she has a frame for her bed, and a little nightstand she got at a Salvation Army in Colorado Springs.
I flick the Bic, watch the orange-yellow flame touch the twist of white rice paper. Inhale. Suck deep, and hold it in. It doesn’t hit right away. This is kinda shitty weed, but I haven’t had a chance to sniff out a good hook-up yet. It’ll do, though. It ain’t the danks, but it’s decent. After another long inhalation, I feel it. Light-headed, slow, floating. Cares are gone.
I watch my hand lift the lighter up. I stare at it. It’s my favorite lighter. Red, slim, and translucent, the fluid jiggling low at the bottom. It lights easily, has a good, high flame. It’s got an adjuster, so I can turn the flame up if I want. I do that now, slide the little black piece of plastic to the side, all the way. I roll my thumb across the knob, trying to remember why I shouldn’t do this. I do it anyway. I light it, the flame almost an inch tall now. Holding my palm facing down, I bring the lighter up, up. I feel the heat. It’s a gentle warmth at first. Then, as I move the flame closer to my flesh, it turns to burning. Pain.
Yes.
I suck in another hit, feeling the high whirl through me, tossing me up and away, in the cloud-world of hazy uncaring. The pain grounds me. Brings me down, anchors me so I don’t float away. It’s just my palm at first, heat baking my skin. I trace the flame along the lines of my palm. Not enough. I run it along my finger, up the pad of my index finger. Now the pain becomes real. It’s a true burn. Harsh and furious, deep and aching. The burn sears me, and I relish it. My fingertip reddens. When the heat reaches a threshold I cannot ignore, I let the flame snuff out. I hold my finger up and examine it. It’ll blister.
The song fades, and “Home Sweet Hole” by Bring Me the Horizon comes on. I nod in approval. I like this song. They’re a little screamo for my taste overall, but this is a good tune. Another hit, and I blow the smoke out the window, watch it skirl through the screen and get snatched away by the puff of breeze. I’m in the ether now. The joint is almost gone, just a roach. I pinch the cherry between finger and thumb, not even registering the slight twinge of the heat. Opening the lid of the tin Band-Aid box, I toss the roach and the lighter in, on top of the baggie of pot. The box goes into my backpack, way at the bottom of the front pocket, beneath pens and guitar picks and crushed granola bars.
I lie down flat on the bed, close my eyes, and listen to the music, feeling the aching burn of my palm and finger. “Life of Uncertainty” by It Dies Today comes on, and I soak it up, sink into it. Drifting, drifting.
It’s a fleeting respite.
When unwelcome clarity starts to penetrate the fog, I slide off the bed, grab my guitar and my amp. Adjust the tuning slightly, flick the volume a little higher, and do some scales to limber up my fingers. My index finger hurts, making it tricky to move from string to string, but it’s fine. I’m used to it. The burning is my secret, my release. I smoke pot because it loosens the grip of the anger and the bitterness of my fatherless, nomadic life. The burning is…I don’t know what it is. Rage is exhausting, bitterness is exhausting. Burning is a way to feel something else, to alleviate it. To feel something in this life.
“Breaking Out, Breaking Up” by Bullet for My Valentine comes on. I taught myself this song, and I play along. When the song ends, I grab the tiny remote off the floor and click the iPod off. I play one of my own songs. It’s an instrumental because I don’t sing and sure as hell don’t write no goddamn poetry. It’s fast and hard, technical. My facility with numbers helps somehow. I can’t make any kind of scientific claims about it, but I relate numbers to playing guitar. Each chord is an equation. Each string is a number. I guess I have quick fingers, so that’s part of it, but the real playing happens in my head. I see the riffs like strings of equations, one plugged into another and another until there’s a whole endless skein of numbers slinging from the six strings.
I lose myself in playing, pressing hard with my burned index finger to keep the pain fresh in my head.
I don’t even notice Mom until she reaches down and turns off the amp. I claw the headphones off and glare up at her. “What the f**k, Mom?”
“You were smoking.”
I shrug and don’t look at her, reach for the “on” switch. “Yeah. So?”
She knows I smoke. She smokes with me sometimes. Only when she’s really bad, when whatever it is that’s driving her becomes too much. She gets melancholy as hell when she smokes, like she’s remembering something.
She grabs my wrists, jerks them up. Shit. I resist, and when she tries to overpower me, I tear my hand from her grip. “Let me see your hands, Oz.” She lets go, but kneels in front of me. Concern fills her gray eyes.
I can’t look at her for long. I keep my hands flat on my knees. “It’s fine. It’s nothing. No big deal.”
“Show…me.” She bites the words out.
I roll my eyes and turn my palms up. She immediately sees the fresh burn on my left hand, the redness on my palm and blister on my finger. “I’m fine, Ma. It’s no big deal.”
“You burned again. You said you weren’t doing that anymore.” She sinks back to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of me. She still has her apron on, the server book stuffed inside, fat with cash. She’s never been real modest around me, and now is no exception. She works at a nightclub as a cocktail waitress. Which means short skirts, low-cut shirts. I look away at the wall, out the window.