Chapter 9
Ethan
I don’t know how long I sat on my bed, half naked and confused, but I sat there a long time. Nothing was what I thought it was. My world was upside down. Molly was a Skull. She was a part of the fucking Skulls. The worst gang masquerading as a motorcycle club. They were the worst of the bunch in Reidsville.
The Bandits and The Skulls had a long-standing history. Though we had no major conflicts although we occupied the same areas, it was clear we were not buddies. We had almost been at each other’s throats for years, but in the past six months, it had gotten worse. The Skulls dealt guns, both illegally and legally. The legal ones were small-time arms, but rumors were they were pushing into deeper waters trying to supply heavier and unregistered weight. Now, word on the street was they could supply anything ranging from Glocks to grenade launchers and everything in between – which was bad business for us. They were growing fast and beginning to press on us. A storm was brewing and like an animal, we could feel the tension in the air.
While the Skulls focused on destruction, the Bandits focused on pleasure. We owned a string of bars and started opening strip clubs around the region. Amongst the pleasure of flesh, we pleasured the craving of men and their toys. The garage was the most profitable of our businesses. I held no biases against bikes and fixed crotch rockets or Harleys and anything big or small in between. We did everything from oil changes to custom builds. The garage kept the legal side of our operations afloat while the bar and strip club provided drugs and pussy dealings that weren’t always clean. If you were looking for something a little harder than spirits or a lap dance, The Bandits could provide it.
In all reality, we should have been able to get along since we weren’t direct competition. But no, several small beefs along the way led us to the classic standoff. We didn’t like each other on principle and it seemed like no matter what, we couldn’t lay the beef to rest. Now that most certainly could be forgotten. I still wasn’t convinced this wasn’t some kind of trick to hurt me or elaborate scheme to find out club secrets. I put their president in the hospital and trashed his bike. That was not something easily forgotten or forgiven. If anything, I probably added 100 years of hatred to our bill. Skulls and Bandits weren’t going to be friendly anytime soon.
I was far from pleasure at the moment, which sucked considering how close I was to pleasure before the Earth shattered around me. Molly was on my mind no matter how often I tried to erase her. I couldn’t even lie and say she was getting under my skin. She was already there. I could barely think around her let alone think about her. What the hell had she done to me? If she were anyone else, I would have drank, smoked, and moved on to another one. But instead I was walking around aimless, confused and hurt. I was hurt, which was saying something since I rarely cared about anyone but myself. It was the kind I wanted to dull – to numb. My brain whispered of the high I could get with a little meth. Just enough to knock the edge off the pain.
You know how some people can read for hours? Or how some people can get lost in their craft no matter how long they’ve been doing it? That was how bike engines were for me. Life could be going to hell on a grease pole, but if my hands were in the belly of a bike, things didn’t seem as bad. Fixing a bike was akin to fixing my life. It let me feel like I was in control. It was one of the only things I was good at – aside from getting into trouble.
My hands and feet took me there on autopilot. One minute I was in my bedroom, devastated, and the next I was in the garage, sitting amongst the smoky fumes of an exhaust and tools to fix the problem. All my problems were drowned out with the clank of metal on metal as my wrench worked and the background noise of the radio playing whatever was popular. The tool was in my hand now, twisting from left to right and I lost myself in the motion.
The pain was right there, bubbling just under the surface and feeling a little too real. A little too raw and a little too familiar. Heartbreak. Unsuspecting pain.
*****
I saw the men standing around the living room with somber looks. I saw them drinking to his honor and my mom trying to wipe her tears inconspicuously on the couch, but it still didn’t feel real. It hadn’t felt real when they told us my father was gunned down in a meeting to discuss a neutrality clause to promote peace, or when we stood over the closed black casket with our emblem carved into the smooth marble in white. None of that had felt real. Not seeing my brother stoically throwing a rose petal into the ground, the packed memorial, the stories so many people told about my dad and how he touched their lives. The pats of sympathy people gave me didn’t feel real, and neither did the piles of food people left at our house. It wasn’t real. In my head, I could explain it all away.
I was so good at explaining it all away, but I couldn’t explain away the bike in the garage sitting under a thick layer of dust.
“Always keep your bike clean, Ethan. You can judge a man by the quality of his bike.”
There was dust on it. Thick, though in reality it hadn’t been sitting by itself for many days. It was dirty. Dusty and not shining – very unlike the way the man I knew would have left it.
“Always keep your bike clean.”
Dust was real.
Why wasn’t he keeping it clean? It was like a loud speaker screamed inside of me, “He’s not here.” It was so loud it shook the walls I’d built around me and broke me. I crumbled like the walls around me, hard, to the ground in the garage, into a heap of bones. The coldness of the cement barely registering as the coldness of his death, my loss, settled in.
I didn’t know how long I lay there. No one came by, no one asked what was wrong, and no one cared. When I finally stood, I stood on the brink of something I couldn't describe. The weight of everything seemed to press down on my shoulders and I struggled to take even a single step forward. It was too much. All of it. And somehow, I kept moving. But every step cost me. The darkness grew darker; the pain grew sharper; all of it seemed to only grow in strength and I began to wonder if things could ever get better.
But I never said a word. Sometimes I wondered if that smile, the horribly fake smile, was ever seen through. No one noticed the sad broken look in my eyes. The true depth of my then bluer than blue eyes. There was no light to me. Only ice. But no one noticed.
Everyone though I was doing so well. I hadn’t cried, I wasn’t moping, and according to everyone else, I was acting like my regular self, but I was barely eating and I wasn’t sleeping. I stayed up to the crack of dawn every night until my body couldn’t hold out any longer. I heard my mother crying in her sleep and my brother sneaking out. I had plenty of time to think. Not sleeping helped me realize I was alone. There was no one left to stop me from getting into trouble – no one left to demand better of me. There was nothing left to feel. All I could feel was my brokenness. I wondered if I would ever feel anything else. That question led me to parties, bars, and late night bingeing. It led me to try 100 proof alcohol, weed, and eventually meth.
Only then did I feel for once like I could fly. For the first time in a long time, I was flying instead of sinking to death from a darkness that wouldn’t let go. I didn’t feel so cold. There was heat inside me. I had energy and I could sleep. I could sleep for hours instead of thirty minutes. I had an appetite and could laugh. I could see the light of day and, for a time, I was no longer alone.
But it never lasted. It never does. It eventually went away and the darkness clouded my eyes again, seemingly darker than it was before. The cold felt more biting than I remembered and I was drowning under something I couldn’t name. I needed more. I couldn’t bear the darkness and I drowned in all that meth could provide. One frat party I snuck into gave me powder, and somehow that powder held power over me.
*****
For just a moment, the same coldness blew threats on my heart and I thought about how wonderful it felt to ignore it before. When I was sixteen, it seemed so magical and simple. But now I was a man. Thirty-three years old and in control. I couldn’t and wouldn’t go back. I stood, and without thinking, threw my wrench across the room. It left my hands, hitting the wall and the ground with enough noise to be satisfying.
I wanted to hate her. I hated that bitch so much. Why did she make me feel like that? How did I let her get so close? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about her? I didn’t want to miss her.
Was this love? If this is what love felt like, I didn’t want anything to do with it.