Introduction

In which we introduce the characters.

This is not the running sentence of a generation. It is not the most important work to speak to the youth of today. It is not the voice of the silent. It’s pretty much nothing, and that’s pretty much the way it should be, because I’m pretty much nothing. Just a twenty-year-old idiot standing on the side of a dusty road in dusty jeans with his thumb stuck up in the air and his brain fried out on cynicism.

 

The true drug of today’s youth.

 

I could tell you a million stories. They’d all seem funny without being funny. That’s our glory: we can take the most depressing story of human stupidity and misfortune and twist it into something that seems almost enviable. “God, I wish I’d been there!” Yeah, but you don’t, because it was a horrifying example of the kind of decrepit world we live in.

 

I’m going to try to tell you one without exaggerating. I’m not good at that; when it comes to story-telling, I’m something of a genius. I’ve been making my accidents into jealousy-invoking wild rides since I was six. First grade, on the playground, I got into a fight with my best friend. He was never my best friend again after that day and he beat the f**k out of me. Two days later, this is the story I told the neighbor kid:

 

“I got into this fight over Halloween costumes. So we were standing there, me and this kid"his name’s Johnson. Or something like that. Anyway, he sort of elbows me and asks me what I’m going to be for Halloween, and I tell him that I’m going to be Superman, and he tells me that’s stupid, and he’s going to be Batman, and then I tell him that I’d rather be Superman because Superman can fly all over the place, and he goes off about how much better Batman is, and I tell him that Superman"clearly better. And he decks me out of nowhere, and then proceeds to bash in my face! It was crazy! Fists flying everywhere; I think he called my mother a w***e at one point"I mean, where’d he even hear that kind of language? But you don’t find that kind of s**t on the playground these days. Everything’s so sterilized. It’s bullcrap. I’d take a fist fight over Superman vs. Batman any day rather than put up with the kind of childhoods these lucky little s***s are getting.”

 

Alright, that’s not what I told the neighbor kid. That’s what I told this girl Madison that I like. We were chilling on her friend’s couch at one in the morning and telling stories. But the point is, I made it sound good. And when I told the neighbor kid, I made it sound good. I made it sound awesome. And the truth is that it was horrifying.

 

My dad once got drunk and ran around the neighborhood without his pants on, screaming something completely unintelligible at the top of his lungs, and my grandmother came out of the house with a shotgun and told him to get his a*s back in the house or she’d shoot it off. This is rip-roaringly funny s**t, right here. Except it’s not all that funny when you’re nine.

 

This is what I’m talking about. I’ll tell all these stories proudly, and I laugh about them, but that’s not what they were like. I have a hard time not rewriting them for the masses; not twisting them so they sound wild and amazing. I mean, the truth here is that that says a lot about me. And all my friends are the same, so maybe it says a lot about them. Maybe it says a lot about all of us.

 

But I want to tell you a real story. And I promise"I’m going to try not to twist it. I’m going to try to tell it honestly; how it really went…what it was really like…all that. I’m going to warn you right now"I don’t know if I can. But I’m sure as Hell going to try.

 

Actually, it starts with Madison. Madison, a VW bug, and my best friend since eighth grade: Sam Tulitz.

 

Actually, it’s kind of a funny story…