Creeper

"Amelie, "Sammie," MCG, and friend Anita
a visit to SF before graduation

         He called himself a skinhead. His head was shaved; he wore jeans, suspenders, and tall doc martin boots. He repulsed me, but I was seventeen and I had only two weeks, just two weeks left in Tuolumne, that tiny, tiny town at the bottom of the valley, that had held me too tight with its big mountain arms.
         It was June and the days were long and hot, longer now that leaving was so near. Mom was out of her head from too much meth and not enough sleep. She was either wiping at her nose and sniffing or screaming, using every version of the F word with a "shit" and a "goddamn it" thrown in for emphasis.

As if in a final act of self-hatred, a final cut from the serrated mountain-shaped knife, I began fucking Creeper, or letting him fuck me. Recovering from a broken neck, he wore a neck brace which gave him a de-helmeted Darth Vadar look, and his head shaved with a razor nearly everyday, still flaked with dandruff that up close made him look like a very old man. Still it happened at night, after the beer and the desperation set in. It happened in the dark.

He said he was a skinhead, and I knew what that meant, but still he hung around people he was supposed to hate, or did hate, or whatever. And that's how I felt, whatever. There was no one else. I could tolerate the revulsion for just two weeks. I had been hated for so long already, none of it felt real anymore, and I was going to leave it all behind. I just had to get through these last fourteen days -- the bitter end of a long sentence, just 336 hours, 20160 minutes, 1209600 seconds of the dusty driveway, the dry star thistles, the go-no-where roads, and the dead feeling inside.