Epilogue
Shannon
The day after my last final, I take a bus from Berkeley to Seattle to spend two days with Andy. He isn’t coming home for Christmas again. He got a job working as a game designer and keeps saying he can’t get the time off from work to go back and see his family. Of course, that’s just an excuse. I can’t really blame him, because I’ve made enough of my own. When he found out that Clark would be in Parlor City for the first time since he left town four years ago, Andy almost agreed, but decided against it at the last minute. I’ve been back there a few times, and it’s hard. I drove past the school one summer, and I almost cried. Four years. It seems like it’s been forever, but even today, I can still hear echoes of that school, see the faces of kids who died, picture Christian sitting in the back room of the library with us, laughing, his devilock hair hanging limply down over his face.
Andy knows I’ve been on a big Sleater Kinney kick, so he took me to a show at the Sit and Spin club, which incorporates a bar, a coffee shop, a club and a Laundromat into one. He claims that one time he was doing his laundry there while the Murder City Devils were playing. He always tacks on that he just did it for the novelty of the situation, not for anything else.
I made it a point to not tell anyone but Clark that I’m coming home. In fact, I told my mom I wasn’t coming home for Christmas. She gets a little upset at times, but understands, I guess. I can’t help but think about what happened every day. How is a person supposed to get over something like that? No matter what I hear on TV, or the newspapers, or books, they can’t make me think of Christian as a monster.
I called Clark from Andy’s house. He gets into town on the twenty-fourth, the day after I do, and we make plans to get together that night. Andy takes me to the bus station and I catch the 3:30 bus, which I will be on for the next three days. I keep my headphones on, take a few sleeping pills and manage to meet only a few interesting people.
I was seeing a boy in Los Angeles last year, so that meant a lot of ten-hour bus rides. We’d take turns coming to see each other twice a month, so I was riding down there once a month, and learned a lot about long bus rides. The first thing I learned was how to avoid making new friends. First, you want to be as close to the front of the line as possible. Take a seat, and sit on the window side. Have your backpack in the seat next to you. Get your headphones on as soon as possible, and start digging through your bag as fast as you can get it unzipped. It is also quintessential to the plot to be as frightening looking as possible. I always choose the black skirt, fishnets, combat boots, Misfits T-shirt and leather biker jacket ensemble, with hair possibly dyed an outlandish color, heavy eye-liner, and dark lipstick. This keeps the normals at bay, but a lot of other wierdo’s will want to talk to you. That’s what the headphones and offensive books are for. I’ve learned more about a huge collection of murderers and rapists through my travels on Greyhound. Because of this, I sit alone for most of my three-day trip back to Parlor City.
It’s early on the morning of Christmas Eve, maybe 2AM, when the bus pulls into Parlor City, and I took a couple Vicodens a couple hours ago, so I’m pretty fucked up right now. I end up sitting down in the cold, hard bus station seats, the ones with the quarter television sets mounted on them, for about ten minutes until I can get my bearings. I think I’ve always pictured Hell to be like a bus station. It always looks like it’s the middle of the night, even when the sun is shining outside, and the heavy fluorescent lighting seems to slice away at your eyes, cutting toward your brain. Even though they are always empty, that dull, grey tile echoes the occasional voice around for about three hours, preserving the conversations of people who have already departed, combining them in a hellish cacophony that feels like an ice pick in the ear.
When I muster up the energy to move, I put all my bags in a locker and wander around downtown for a while. Not much has changed here. Nothing ever does. The buildings lining Court Street are reminiscent of a time when this city was once a node of industry, and its prosperity shows. Great orange and grey brick buildings tower over me, like they are looking down, letting me know just how small and insignificant I am. None are more than five or six stories tall, but yet they seem to be mountains. There is not a single new store, but there are three new restaurants and two new coffee houses.
I make the mistake of making eye-contact with a short, burly man that looks to be somewhere in his late thirties to early forties. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” He is beckoning me with his left hand, holding out a baby-blue, down coat, and is careful to keep his right hand closely tucked to his thigh, which is why I think I might have looked at it right away, desperate to see what he’s hiding, and it’s all bandaged, with his fingers poking out of it. He sees me looking, and before I can even register what I’m seeing, before he is saying, “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he says. “I just got out of the hospital for that.” Yeah, yeah, that is what I’m seeing... Only three fingers and half his thumb are poking out of his bandage. “I need to ask a favor,” he says, and I’m trying to just not look at him, and have him get the picture. I’m sure I’ve dealt with far scarier street people in San Francisco than anything Parlor City could throw at me, but at 2:30 in the morning, that’s not a comfort. I reach into my purse and grab my butterfly knife. “Excuse me!”
“Fuck off.” I put my head down and step to the side to get around him.
“No, wait, now listen.” I think he sees me slow my pace slightly, and he takes this as permission to continue. “Now, just hear me out here, I’m not asking for a lot here... This is a... This is an $80 coat. I just want $4 for it. Just $4, not ten, not twenty, just four.”
Who could he owe money to that he’s this desperate? That part has me a little worried, but you don’t want to show these motherfuckers fear, they eat that kind of thing up. “Fuck off,” I say, and keep walking. I’m kind of scared to look back, but when no more comes, I allow myself to exhale.
There is nothing open at this hour, not even a bar, but it’s not that cold out, so I just wander around for a while, reacquainting myself with Parlor City. How many barber shops does downtown need?
I end up taking a cab to my parents’ house, climbing in through a window in the garage, and sleeping on their basement couch. I’m awoken around seven the next morning by the sound of my mother cooking and watching television upstairs. I put my clothes back on and go upstairs. When I go in the kitchen, my mother first screams in shock, then just stands and stares at me for several seconds, and then tackles, almost knocking me to the ground and throwing her arms around me. My dad comes in the room, and does his best to look characteristically unimpressed, but I can see the excitement behind his eyes.
I hang out with them for a while, take a shower, change my clothes. Despite their protests to stay with them longer, I borrow her car, and go to Christian’s mother’s house.
Christian’s parents split up about three years ago, but his mother is living in the same house. To be honest, I was hoping she wouldn’t be here. This is the first time I’ve seen her since that hot day that about ten people, as many police, and more news crews than I can remember were crowded around a hole in the ground at Riverside Cemetery, to watch one of the country’s most hated mass-murderers be put in the ground. Clark, Andy and I were still under investigation, and there had been threats that we would be put in the ground with Christian that day. The police, most of whom also thought we were guilty, and made no bones about telling us this, were there to make sure this didn’t happen.
I can tell that Christian’s mom wants to cry when she sees me, but she holds it back. We exchange little conversation, just a few polite “how have you been’s” and such. I ask her where Christian’s grave is. They have moved it twice in the last four years, because people keep vandalizing it. She tells me the plot number, and even has a little map of the graveyard to point out approximately where it is, way in the back, down near the the river.
It isn’t hard to find it, off by its self, away from the other graves. It’s almost fitting, really, that they’ve forced him to the outside even in death. When he was first buried, he had a large headstone, but that hardly lasted a month before someone broke in and smashed it with a sledgehammer. A few months after that, someone tried to dig him up. That was the first time he was moved. The vandalism remained steady after that. Two years later, the families of people buried around him had caused such a commotion that the cemetery was forced to move him again. Now, he just has a little brass plaque with his birth date and day he died. Someone has spray-painted “FUCK” in red paint over the top of it, but that is faded and chipped, and looks like it’s been there for quite a while. I leave a rose on his grave, but don’t talk to him. Then I go home and spend the rest of the evening with my parents.
I sleep late on Christmas Eve, getting up around noon. I call Kyle Welling, who I made the mistake of telling I was going to be in town. He decided he was in love with me right before I left for California, right after it all happened, right when I wanted to forget everything, right when all I wanted to do was leave town. He e-mailed me every day for the first year, most of them going unread. I figure I should get hanging out with him out of the way as fast as possible, and be done with it. He isn’t there, so I leave a message on his machine. I call Clark, but he’s out having lunch with his brother. I call Todd Filth, who is at home. He is happy to hear from me, because I forgot to tell him I was going to be around, and he asks if I want to go for coffee.
I shower and change my clothes three times. Kyle calls my cell phone, and then my home phone, and I don’t answer either time. I think the main reason I don’t want to see him is because he always wants to talk about Christian. We never hung out with him in high school, but he always tells stories like he was right there with us.
Right before I leave, I call him aback and invite him along, knowing he won’t want to go. Predictably, he declines, no doubt just wanting to ‘be alone’ with me, so I borrow my mom’s car and head off. Todd Filth is already at the coffee shop when I arrive. I first only want tea, but the ‘cookies ‘n cream bars,’ are too good-looking to ignore, so I buy one of those. We eat and talk for about an hour or so, and I ask him if he wants to do some running around with me.
Todd and I first go over to Rubin Valentine’s house to pick up some cash for pot. Then we go to the shopping plaza, where I pick up some socks, a scarf, and a couple books for my mom.
“What do you need a scarf for,” Todd asks. “You live in California, isn’t it warm all the time there?”
“Have you ever been to San Francisco?” I ask him. “It’s not warm there at all.”
When I’m done shopping, we go to Todd’s dealer’s house to buy some pot. I buy a bag for myself, but don’t really want any right now, so I just hang out and watch TV while they do the deal in the bathroom and then smoke a blunt.
Clark calls me, wanting to know if I still want to get together tonight. He tells me that this Fear cover band is playing. Kyle Welling said he was going to be there, so I think I’d rather skip it. I never liked Fear that much anyway. The trouble today with women is that Lee Ving can suck my cunt. Todd says he is meeting some people at the Spot, so I tell Clark to find me there.
I drop Todd off at his house and go home to eat dinner with my family. My mom has gotten reservations to the Firehouse Restaurant, which is considered to be the finest restaurant in town. I’m unimpressed, but fake it for their sake. I’m pretty much obliged, as my parents shelled out nearly $200 for them, myself, and my little sister to eat dinner here, and we didn’t even get any of the expensive items. This girl, Rebecca, that I knew from Girl Scouts, is our waitress. I don’t think I’ve seen or talked to her in about ten years. We more-or-less pretend we don’t know each other.
We get home from dinner around nine. I take another shower, put on jeans and a T-shirt, read for a while, and then take a nap until eleven. My mom won’t let me borrow her car, because I will be drinking, so I call a cab. No one is at the Spot when I get there, so I get a pitcher and sketch for a while until Todd Filth and his friends show up. They all look really fried, and lost in their own little world. Most of them don’t know me, so I get largely ignored. Todd makes a few small advances, and even though I used to have a major crush on him, I think that might be gone, and I don’t know if I would hook up with him at this point.
I’m about ready to go home, when Clark shows up around 12:30. It’s the first time we’ve been face-to-face in two years, when I went to visit him in Florida that summer. I hug him, and we get our own table. He apologizes for being late, saying he went to the show to see the Fear cover band, who had already played when he got there, but he didn’t know this until the show was over. We split a pitcher and go back to his house, smoke some pot, talk about old times, and agree to spend some time together before he goes back to Florida on the 27th, knowing it probably won’t happen. Around three in the morning, I take a cab home.
It’s starting to snow. I miss Christian.
FIN
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