Damned

the stinking doobie to the object of my preteen adoration. For a Judy Blume instant, our fingers touched. Barely our fingertips brushed, sprawled as we were on the carpet, not dissimilar to God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but a spark of life—or merely static electricity—snapped and jumped between us.

Goran took the joint and puffed. He tapped the ash onto a dinner plate, next to a half-eaten cheeseburger and an array of stale potato chips. We both sat, silent, holding the smoke in our lungs. Romantic anarchists that we are, we ignored the fact that this was a nonsmoking suite. On television, someone accepted an Oscar for something. Somebody thanked someone. A commercial pitched mascara.

Exhaling, I coughed. I coughed and coughed, a genuine fit, finally reaching for a glass of orange juice which sat on a tray with a cold plate of buffalo wings. The air in the suite smelled like every wrap party my parents had ever hosted on the final day of principal photography. Stinking of cannabis and French fries and scorched rolling paper. Cannabis and congealed chocolate fondue. On television, a European luxury sedan raced across desert salt flats, swerving between orange traffic cones, driven by a movie star, and I'm not certain whether this is another commercial or something sampled from a nominated movie. Next, a famous actress drinks a major brand of diet soda in what could be either an advertisement or a feature film. Even the fast cars seem to drag along in slow motion. My hand reaches out toward a plate of cold garlic toast, and Goran slips the smoldering roach between my fingers. I take another hit, and hand it back. I reach toward a plate heaped with steaming, buttery, mouthwatering prawns, but my fingertips touch only smooth glass. My fingernails scratch at this glass barrier.

Goran laughs, blasting out great clouds of sour dope stench.

My prawns, so enticing and delicious-looking, are merely a television commercial for a franchised seafood restaurant. Tasty and crunchy and completely beyond my reach. They're only a teasing mirage of savoriness on the high-definition screen.

On television, gigantic hamburgers rotate slowly, their grilled meat so hot it still bubbles and spits with grease. Slices of cheese collapse, molding themselves over the contours of searing-hot beef patties. Molten rivers of fudge flow through a mountainous landscape of vanilla soft-serve ice cream under a cruel hail of chopped Spanish peanuts. Blizzards of powdered sugar bury frosted doughnuts. Pizza drips dollops of tomato sauce and trails gooey whitish strings of mozzarella.

Goran takes the smoking roach from between my fingers. He takes another hit, chasing the smoke with a swig of chocolate milk shake.

Once more mouthing the damp butt of the shared marijuana cigarette, I attempt to discern the flavor of my beloved's saliva. Tonguing the moist folds of paper, I taste chocolate-chip cookies purloined from the minibar. I taste the tang of artificial fruit, lemons, cherries, watermelon, stolen candies, forbidden to us because of their tooth-decaying qualities. At last, beneath it all, my taste buds locate something earthy, fecund, the spit of my primitive rebel man-boy, the foreign pong of my stolid Heathcliff. My rustic rude savage. I relish this, the appetizer to a banquet of Goran's moist tongue kisses. In the scorched ganja I taste the residue of his chocolate milk shake.

On television, a basket of nachos, heavily laden with sliced olives and gory salsa, this vision dissolves to take the shape of a beautiful woman. The woman wears a red gown—in hindsight, more orange than red—a scrap of grosgrain ribbon pinned to her bodice. The ribbon as pink as diced tomatoes. The woman says, 'The nominees for this year's best motion picture are...'

The woman on screen is my mom.

At this, I climb to my feet, towering above the hotel carpet, swaying high above the discarded food and Goran. I stumble into the suite's bathroom; there, I unroll an awful lot of toilet paper, miles of toilet paper, making two lumps of roughly equal size which I proceed to stuff into the front of my sweater. In the bathroom mirror, my eyes look red-rimmed and bloodshot. I stand sideways to the mirror and study my new busty profile. I pull the tissue from inside my sweater and flush it down the toilet—the tissue, not the sweater. I am so high. It seems as if I've been in this bathroom for years. Decades have passed. Aeons. I pull open a drawer next to the sink and retrieve the long strip of Hello Kitty condoms. I reemerge from the bathroom, presenting myself before Goran with the strip of condoms looped around the back of my neck like a feather boa.

On television, the camera shows my dad sitting in the audience, midway down the main floor, right on the aisle, his favorite seat, so he can sneak out and drink martinis during the awards for boring foreign crap. Only scant moments have actually gone by. Everyone applauds. Still standing in the bathroom doorway I bow, deeply.

Goran looks from the television to me. His eyes almost glow red, and Goran coughs. Crimson seafood sauce is smeared on his chin. Gooey dabs of tartar sauce trail down the front of his shirt. The air in the suite hangs misty, foggy with dope smoke.

I knot the strip of condoms around my neck and pull the knot tight, saying, 'You want to play a game?' I say, 'You only need to blow into my mouth.' I step forward, slinking toward my beloved, and say, 'It's called the French- kissing Game.'

XXII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please don't take this as a criticism, but you really ought to upgrade your word-processing equipment. The readability of your dot-matrix printer especially way sucks, not to mention those perforated tracks that hang off the edges of every printed page.

My mom would tell you, 'Two lips and a tongue can promise you anything.' Meaning: Get all your deals in writing. Meaning: Always preserve a paper trail.

Across the top of the printed form, the faint dot-matrix words read: Hell Induction Report for Goran Metro Spencer. Age 14.

Under 'Site of Death' it says: Los Angeles River Detention Center for Violent Juvenile Offenders.

That would explain his hot-pink getup, complete with the prison number sewn to his chest. While somewhat fashion-forward, still not an obvious choice for the moody, imperious Goran I know.

Under 'Cause of Death' the report says: Stabbed by fellow inmate during riot.

Under 'Reason for Damnation' it says: Manslaughter conviction for the strangulation of Madison Spencer.

XXIII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Unpleasant as death might seem, the upside is that you only suffer it once. Subsequent to that, the sting is gone. The memory might be enormously traumatic, but that's all it is: a memory. You won't be asked to perform an encore. Unless, just possibly, you're a Hindu.

Probably I shouldn't even tell you this next part. I know how self-righteous alive people are.

Face it, every time you scan the obituary pages in the newspaper and you see somebody younger than yourself who died—especially if the obit features a photograph of them smiling, sitting on some mown lawn beside a golden retriever, wearing shorts—admit it, you feel so damned superior. It could be you also feel a smidgen lucky, but mostly you feel all smug. Everybody alive feels so superior to the dead, even homosexuals and American Indians.

Probably when you read this you'll just laugh and make fun of me, but I remember gasping for breath, choking there on the carpet of the hotel suite. The crown of my head was wedged against the bottom of the television screen, the remains of our room-service banquet arrayed on plates around me. Goran knelt astride my waist, leaning over me, his face looming above my face; his hands gripped the two ends of the Hello Kitty condoms which were knotted around my neck, and he was yanking the noose tight.

The stink of our every exhaled breath hung heavy, clouding the suite with its skunkweed reek.