Back when I was nineteen and convinced I was an adult and had “started” my life—I was living on my own and working full time––I managed to walk home every night after line cook–shifts from a college bar named Rulloff’s, down a steep-ass hill, across my small town, and back up another hill to a house I “rented” with my friend Erik—we were just paying to cat sit for some lady—and I guess I felt invincible and didn’t care much what happened to me. One of my friends, Enzo, had just died, and he’d probably felt a similar way, invincible and lost.
The driver had lived, the passenger too, but Enzo had flown from the car. I went to my shift after his funeral and snapped at my manager when he asked me to put on a hat. It is always confusing to find out that you aren’t really invincible and maybe you don’t care about what happens to yourself, but you sure as hell care what happens to your friends. Maybe it’s also a good time for me to admit that Enzo and I hadn’t been all that close the last five years before he died, but, god, he meant a lot to me. Maybe we’d stopped hanging out, but I remember him making a point to check in on me when we passed each other in the halls of our high school, which was somewhat rare because neither of us were at school that often. The last time I saw him was less than a month before the crash.
I was actually much closer with his younger brother, Antonio, when it all happened. I tried to be there, to make sure he was doing as okay as he could’ve been, and sometimes I felt like I should speak up and say something like, Maybe you shouldn’t drink quite that much or take those drugs, but who the fuck was I? It wasn’t my place to tell anyone how to cope. It’s hard not knowing the right ways to be there for a person, and I could have definitely done better, but I still tried. And when Antonio asked me to go with him to an underground show, I did. And when he wanted to go out tagging buildings on his birthday at one in the morning, I was happy to join. And when he told me to snort his brother’s ashes because “it’s what he would have wanted,” you can bet your ass I did it, because that’s what friends are for.
For anyone curious about what snorting someone’s ashes is like: It is easy to do, as far as overriding the synapses firing in your brain telling you that you shouldn’t, but the actual snorting is hard. At that point in my life, I don’t think I had ever snorted drugs, just Smarties and flour, which says a lot about who I was in middle school. Since then, the only drugs I’ve snorted are psychedelic research chemicals that I stupidly dosed into capsules that previously contained cinnamon, so they really burned. That says a lot about who I was in my young adulthood. Ashes were different from any of these. They were coarse with some bigger chunks inside––I am sure these were bones––that were sharp and stung. I also wonder where in the realm of cannibalism this lies, but I am not really an expert on that and so can’t say. I definitely wasn’t thinking about this at the time; I was actually doing my best not to think about anything.
Around a month later, I threw up on my friends’ couch after blacking out at their sweater soiree while Antonio was in the woods smoking weed and letting himself feel sad—I wish I could do this sometimes. I ended up making an apology cake for my friends’ couch, alongside a birthday cake for Antonio, which, per his request, had more of Enzo’s ashes baked into it. And we never told Erik––who gladly mowed down some of that dead-kid cake––that he had unknowingly, in some form, eaten human. And it wasn’t until much later that I actually felt vulnerable, like I could die too.
