the devolution of youth

im not sure if another couple of narratives are on the way

In the broad scheme of things, the single most pivotal moment in my life looms at the end of a series of wrong decisions, when the death of a friend forced me to confront my own mortality- my real place in the world. Jacob was a fuck-up, hell-bent on reshaping the world around him to alleviate his own insecurities, and I was a fourteen year old with no real direction and a little too much room in his head. In the passing of the biggest parts of my life were born the smallest victories of a young man over apprehension.

I remember the light haired kid with stubby fingers, the corner of his yellow smile blistered over from Louisiana heat. He dropped out of school to work at a local pizza place, and his car sometimes smelled of melting cheese. There was something, my friends and I thought, very radical about him. Jacob, as his nametag read in scratched up block letters, had managed to woo Sydney, one of the more attractive girls in our class, and no matter what your mistakes, that makes you a god to a horny freshman.

Jacob seemed to think we were kindred spirits from the beginning, throwing his arm around me when I came in after school with a couple of buddies of mine. "Score me a ticket out of this shithole, pal?" he'd ask me with the devilish smirk of someone haunted by the idea that he had nearly run out of options in life. It was easy to ignore at first, to pass him off as some clown who got lucky a few less times than unlucky, to call him a deadbeat, to be snide. But in truth, I envied him for his apathy and the conversational Spanish he would throw back into the kitchen and the hair on the top of his lip. We became friends.

There was a certain burn to the cocaine he lined up for me on the Sunday before Martin Luther King’s birthday, and his laugh, that listless echo, was the only thing I heard for half an hour after the hit. Whether because of the drugs or not, there was no denying that Jacob was magnanimous. His yellowish grin lit up the room, and his buddies (some dozen of them hailing from towns across the South like a parade of drop-outs, political ne’er-do-wells, and juvenile delinquents) sat around like kindergarteners waiting for a new story, except each exchange was always the same. There were no bunnies scurrying about nor forks running away with spoons, only some kid taking too much of some drug and ending up somewhere other than where he expected to be. I suppose there was something familiar to it, something that put me at ease.

Sydney showed up after the laughs had died down and the buzz had worn off, wearing a cut-up West Ouachita High School t-shirt. She recognized me from our ambling through the hall. Never before had I so loved my school; never before had I really considered myself in the same social circle as someone like her. The appeal was all in that sense of belonging, the exclusivity of the crew.

“You’re Matt, right?” she asked with a little too much upward inflection in her voice.

“That’s what they tell me,” I always was a bit socially awkward, forgoing the straightforwardness of my peers for the ambiguity of a dumbass who had only recently started using harder drugs.

We kept up awkward conversation, Sydney and I, fumbling through gossip and where we wanted to go in life. She liked photography, and I liked the way her body curved when she leaned over the Ouachita Bridge to take pictures.

It was sometime in the early throws of April when I really saw her, a firecracker blue summer dress keeping time with some shitty pop song the world was tired of listening to. We were in P.E. standing in the shadows of school buses.

"You look... nice," I stammered, a little worried about the prospect of hitting on a friend's girlfriend.

"Jake didn't think so," she murmured, a little delighted at the idea of being complimented. "I'm glad someone appreciates the effort."

"Would you like to grab something to eat?" I asked with a little less trepidation. We skipped class through the little neighborhood behind the school and found ourselves on Highway 51, an Arby's staring us down.

She took my hand and dashed into the sandwich joint, quickly pulling me around the corner into the bathroom. We came back to school a couple hours later a little hungrier than before. It was that awkward, tenuous, ephemeral moment that would haunt me for some time to come, a perfect photograph of moments overcoming inhibitions for a couple of kids who knew a little too much of the world around them.

Jacob, whether in a little spat or through word of mouth, quickly discovered what was hiding under his nose. I'm not sure if it simply blindsided him or if he was simply a lot less coarse than I had always imagined him, but the day he spent shouting at me about loyalties, gargling phrases in his mouth his family had taught him long ago, I only noticed the sleep in his eyes. He aged that day: a sloping brow, the wrinkle across his forehead, and that pink-red tapestry of bloodshot vessels in the corners of his eyes.

I felt that nervous growl of my stomach, the uneasiness animals get when they feel a storm coming, and it was standing there in that nearly omnipotent moment that I knew Jacob was going to die, that there was nothing I could do, and that it was entirely my fault.

I'm not sure if the overdose was accidental or not, by that point we were all taking enough prescription medication to kill any one of us three times over, drowning the insecurities we had about ourselves and the memories of mistakes we couldn't bring ourselves to regret, but he did die. And it was in the days leading up to it, that I drew more lessons than anyone has taught me since.

In a more existential sense it was Jacob's death that allowed us all to age a little more and grow into who we are supposed to be. Certain people are simply meant to pass time on the earth, walking astray, beating new paths to morality. Though he may not have led me to salvation or to enlightenment, there's no denying that he connected a timid kid to a more world-heavy, less apprehensive young man.