The last fuck up standing.

I’m not sure if that’s the title I want to bear but it’s the truth. Back in college and afterwards, I was surrounded by other fuck ups. We went to the bars and clubs six days week. When did recreational drugs. We constantly complained about how our lives weren’t coming together.

Friend by Friend got into rehab or found religion or became really great liars. We each became liabilities to each other. We used to be each other’s family: myron, edcoco, Miguel, paul, mita, Sha, Crystal, Curtis. I mean these kids had problems. Myron family hated him. Always hated him. He was so ignored. He grew up to go to college, get his masters and sustain a very expensive cocaine and ectasy problem. He used to be one of my best drinking buddies along with Johanthn. WE used to call ourselves “Trash.” We even got t-shirts.

I remember when Edcoc was in the free clinic every other weekend. I got tired of going with him. He always had something. He always called me over to his apartment and asked me what this or that was or if he should do something about it. They all used to call me if they got sent to jail or got in a fight or needed to find whatever drug dealer in whatever city.

I remember when Sha became a stripper. I knew she only did because Cyrstal had been stripping all throughout college. I didn’t like Crystal. I found her ghetto. She liked men who beat her. She also loved her cocaine. We all loved our cocaine. She kept her’s in a vile she wore around her neck like she seen in the mover Dangerious Liasons. Crystal was the type of girl who didn’t like to wake up sober. She kept drugs on her nightstands to do when she woke up in the morning. I loved her for that. I just didn’t like her attitude.

Sha became a stripper. Such a typical tragic girl looking for a man in all the wrong places. She loved men like her father. The men she grew up knowing that cheated on her mother and then abandoned them. She never dealt with her childhood rape. She grew up to like the liquor. She was also the coolest in the group. I love Sha the most because she was an abandoned child like me. I thought we had more in common. I never thought she would become a conversative housewife after the stripping career ended.

And then there was poor, sad, pathetic curtis. I’m still pissed at him, so I will say nothing more but fuck that bastard.

There was a time I only hung with the strippers, escorts, drug dealers, addicts, alcoholics, but all that had to change. We got older. We grew up. We started looking at each other as liablities. First there was my Sister and suddenly I was any good anymore. Then curtis who told me that night in the grocery store when I vomited in the baby aisle and thought it was funny because I was high that I was pathetic. And he meant it.

I’m the last fuck up standing. Maybe I was too loyal. Maybe I didn’t get the memo that I was to report to Rehab. I tried going out into the world and getting more fuck-ups but my heart wasn’t into any more. I also didn’t like what I called the “shiny happy” people. The normal people. People I reblled against. People I told myself I would never become. But things change. The rules change. It hurts. I couldn’t go out in the world and get more fuck-ups because it’s like trying to recreate Woodstock. Those things, clikques, only happen once in a life time. I couldn’t recreate it. That’s when real addiction begins. It’s when the people you used to party with begin to disappear and you’re still at the party dancing on the dance floor by yourself. Maybe I needed it more. Maybe I wanted it more. Maybe I still need to make it make sense.

I’m the last fuck up standing from the class of fuck-ups from 1996-2007. Thad went to jail. Will got killed by his boyfriend. Frederick went to jail. Gaylon died in a car crash. Mita died. Rick died of an overdose. It’s just what happened.

And when I’m out now, I see the new ones. The new class of fuck-ups. They don’t know it yet because they’re drinking they techno-colored drinks, dancing, fucking, thinking they have all the time in the world. But when it’s over, they will come looking for me. Like I went looking for Tim, the ex-drug dealer party boi, like I how I found Emanuel Xaxier, how I found those people who would allow me to have peace with my past.

So dance baby, dance the night away. I’m baking cookies so when you get tired of dancing, we can talk.