Shafto had three stepdaughters with his ex-wife, one of whom, Natalie, was my age. She had the reputation around school of being somewhat of a slut. I doubted there was any truth to that rumor, but there was another rumor, the veracity of which I didn’t question. Natalie’s mother had divorced Shafto upon discovering that he had drilled a hole through the wall into the bathroom and caught him watching one of Natalie’s sisters taking a shower. I never talked with Natalie about Shafto—or anything else for that matter. She was popular and pretty while I was a rebellious loser known for never living up to my potential and committing acts so notoriously subversive that I was revered throughout the entire school district by the disaffected. However, I did hear her one day proudly telling a friend that she had finally been adopted by her new stepfather and would no longer have to bear Shafto’s last name. Once word got around that my mother had married Shafto, rather than giving me her usual look of disdain when we passed in the hallways, something in her attitude toward me softened and her expression took on a note of sympathy.

I didn’t have much contact with Shafto’s family. I had only met his mother a handful of times. Once at the wedding and then the few times she came over to our house. I never participated in any of his family events or holiday gatherings. As far as I knew, the only members of Shafto’s family who were even aware of my existence were the niece and nephew with whom I went to school, his daughter, who came over to stay on some weekends and his mother who had the rare opportunity to spot me outside my room a few times and who dumped her disturbingly ugly dog on us whenever she left town for extended periods.

One evening, I got home from work at the gas station and went into the living room to visit with my mother and Sung before Shafto got home from work. As I entered the room, I saw my mother sitting in her chair with a coffee cup full of ice cream. She was laughing so hard, she had tears streaming from her eyes. I looked around the room to see what she found so profoundly amusing. I was horrified to discover what I considered to be the ugliest animal to have ever cursed my eyes. The Boston Terrier was shaking violently and whimpering, its eyes bulging from its rotund forehead. Then I noticed Sung crouched down in attack position, growling menacingly at her prey.

“What in the fuck is that thing?”

My mother could barely control her laughter enough to respond, “Mary’s dog, Chipper. She’s leaving him here for the week while she’s on vacation in Oklahoma.”

My mother’s voice started to crack from laughter, “Sung’s been stalking him all day. I wish you could have seen it. I can’t stop laughing.”

There’s no animal quite like a Siamese cat. They are more loyal to their families than any dog I have ever known. Once, when I was a child, my mother had a Siamese cat named Tabitha. Tabitha would let me drag her around the house by the tail. One evening, my mother had a babysitter come over so she and my dad could go out. When the babysitter came inside, she walked over to me and reached down to pick me up. Tabitha immediately lunged from the chair where she was curled up and clawed her way up the babysitter’s back. She clung to the woman’s back growling and hissing, making it quite clear she was not to lay a hand on me. My mother carefully extracted Tabitha from the babysitter and she spent the rest of the evening locked in the bedroom.

My disgust at the horrible vision of that wretched dog dissolved away as I took a seat on the couch and watched as Sung, growling and hissing, inched closer and closer to Chipper, who was twice her size. I was delighted. Chipper yelped and urinated on the hardwood floor before running to hide behind a table. Slowly and precisely, Sung continued to stalk him. I sat and watched with pride as she bullied that pathetic animal for over an hour. For my mother and me, this wasn’t just some comical event to pass the time. It was an expression of our dislike of Shafto. Sung was doing to Chipper what we both wanted to do to Shafto.

Then the headlights appeared in the window. My delight turned to despair and my mother’s laughter turned to regret. I quietly went to my room, shut the door and put in my Black Sabbath cassette. I sent a stream of morphine coursing through my veins and sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over with my feet on the floor, my arms resting on my legs and my head lowered. As the song “Iron Man” swirled in the air, I rode the waves of the opiate oceans to another place.

The searing orange sky had no clouds. A red giant star on its deathbed? The burlap-textured ground was flat with the exception of small, smooth mounds and crevices. The trees were like clay and melted lazily in the extreme heat. Fallen trunks lay everywhere and created indentations in the burlap ground.

I sat on a fallen trunk, in the same position as on my bed back in the world of gray. My body was made of metal now and gleamed in the giant red sun, My limbs were joined by rivets of steel. My head—front and rear plates attached at the center with eyes vertically aligned to one side. No other features adorned my face, yet the blankness still betrayed my melancholy.

Something resembling birds created electronic whirs by their very existence and when they sounded, glowing diamonds appeared in the blank orange sky. Streams of paint-like color flowed through the sky – the result of sounds throughout the land. Here, images were heard, sounds were seen and emotions were killed.

I felt as though I had been here an eternity trapped in a metal body that couldn’t be killed, longing in agony for the naked sun to melt me into nothingness.

The next day, I arrived at the gas station thirty minutes late. Toad never complained about my constant tardiness—to me anyway. In the few weeks he had been manager, he completely transformed the gas station. It stunned me that someone could take a job as a gas station manager so seriously. Our weekly work schedules were no longer scribbled on the backs of credit card slips—Toad had designed official Phillip’s 66 scheduling forms on his IBM PCjr and printed them out on a dot-matrix printer. The forms used to do the accounting for each shift were similarly redesigned—no more orange sheets filled with hieroglyphs. Toad also changed the way customers were handled—no more simply taking turns getting cars. Now, each employee was assigned an island and they would get all the cars on that island for their entire shift. This became a source of great strife, because the near island was wildly more busy than the far island. On the night shift, we took turns with the islands—one night I’d have the near island, the next night I’d have the far island. Whoever was lucky enough to have the far island basically just sat around and got high all night. Poor Daryl and Daryl was never lucky, though. Since Toad had important managerial duties to attend to, Daryl and Daryl was always stuck with the maggots on the near island.

Each employee was also assigned a “color” for the entirety of the shift. Toad brought in colored construction paper which he cut into strips. Whenever we had accumulated too much money in our wad, we would have to pare it down, write the amount on the appropriate colored strip, bind it all together with a rubber band, initial it, mark it on the accounting sheet and then stuff the money into the safe.

Toad was also concerned about professionalism. He ruled that all employees must wear their official Phillip’s 66 uniforms. Thankfully, he was never good at enforcing rules and he and Daryl and Daryl were the only ones who ever wore the uniforms. Nobody else would be caught dead in them.

This wasn’t the carefree, loose-and-easy Toad I had known for so many years. The promotion had twisted him into some perverse, responsible authoritarian. He even brought a briefcase to work, though it clashed somewhat with his Phillip’s 66 shirt embroidered with a “Toad” nametag, his long stringy hair, his bushy beard and his enormous beer gut. He was a hippie gone mad—thrust into the high-stakes world of gas-station management. But not even the corruptive influence of his newfound power could tame his addictions. Toad still smoked pot hourly and always had a 40 ounce plastic refillable convenience store mug filled with a mixture of Mountain Dew and Vodka—which he literally drank by the gallon. The straw for the mug had long been destroyed, or lost, or possibly used to snort something, and Toad replaced it with a piece of grey rubber tubing he bought at an auto parts store.

Josh was even later getting to work than I was. He was a shambles. It looked as though he had slept in his clothes and hadn’t bothered to wash or even brush his hair before coming to work. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes. He apologized profusely for his tardiness, claiming to be sick. Unfortunately, he had the near island that night.

It turned out to be a rather strange shift. Neither Josh nor I were in much of a mood to chat and business was unusually slow. We spent most of the evening hanging around the office and staring out the window with the gentle tones of the radio in the background.

I was sitting at the desk, lost somewhere between thought and dream when Josh called out, “Dude!”

Startled, I turned and saw he was holding his nose. Blood was flowing out of it all over his clothes and the floor. He pulled himself out of his chair and hobbled into the bathroom to jam a piece of tissue up his nostril.

“Dude, you haven’t been doing fucking coke, have you?”

“Yeah. We did a bunch last night.”

“Man, I’d stay away from that shit. It’ll fuck you up.”

He closed the door to the bathroom without replying and remained in there for thirty minutes. Occasionally, random sounds would issue from the bathroom—the faucet running, the toilet flushing, Josh calling out, “Dude!” to nobody in particular. I ended up handling several cars on the near island while Josh attempted to reconstitute himself. Josh was just finishing up in the bathroom as Stubby pulled into the near island. I got up, somewhat annoyed, and walked outside to pump his gas.

Stubby grinned as I approached his modified Mercury Grand Marquis. The car was a bright red color and had a mechanized structure built onto the roof where he could load and unload his wheelchair. I always chuckled when I saw his personalized license plates which read, “ENJOY-N.” It was a testament to the human spirit—Stubby had his legs amputated after being wounded during battle in Vietnam. Now with his modified car, he was as mobile as any American and had rebounded from severe depression to study psychology at UMKC. I wondered how many people had been inspired by the message on the plates—a man who had been through so much proclaiming his triumph over hardship. I used to imagine Stubby holding the license plates in one hand, struggling to pull his body up a pile of dead Vietnamese with his other hand. He would reach the top of the heap and triumphantly hold the plates in the air while crying out in victory, spittle flying from his mouth. But Stubby had told me the truth—he had gotten the plates while he was addicted to heroin. It wasn’t life that he was enjoy-n.

I smiled back at Stubby, “Hey man!”

“Hey there!”

“Fill it up?”

“Not today, brother. I was going to ask a favor of you.”

“Sure…”

“Could you run over to the flower shop with me real quick and pick up some flowers?”

Stubby always seemed to have a new girlfriend. I always wondered how he managed it, “Yeah, let me go tell Josh.”

I went inside to find Josh with his head down on the desk, “Dude are you gonna live?”

“I think so.”

“Well, Stubby wants me to go pick up some flowers for him. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

“Sure, dude.”

I got in the car with Stubby and he drove me to the flower shop across the street, where I picked up a nice bouquet he had pre-ordered. When we returned, Josh was standing behind a newer maroon sedan on the far island. Stubby dropped me off and I approached Josh to take over the car, since it was on my island.

“Dude you gotta see this!”

“Did you already do his windshield?” I asked, quietly.

Josh shook his head, so I went to the bucket and grabbed the squeegee. I started cleaning the windshield and looked inside the car to see what Josh was so lathered up about. There was a middle-aged man driving. He wore thick glasses and had greasy black hair and a mustache. His face was pocked with acne scars.

Sitting next to the man was a young boy, maybe 12 or 13. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t moving at all. He was slumped back in the seat, with his head turned to the side. He looked drugged out of his mind. He looked like I had felt the night before. The man had his right hand on the boy’s leg, stroking it slowly. In the back seat was another boy who was completely unconscious.

I finished the windshield, trying to play it cool, and went back to where Josh was still standing behind the car. The guy had only wanted ten dollars worth of gas and Josh finished it up while I was doing the windshield. We looked at each other in disgust. “I’ll get his money, you go call the cops,” I whispered.

I walked around to the driver as Josh ran back inside. “Ten dollars,” I said.

The guy didn’t remove his hand from the boy’s leg and handed me a ten dollar bill. He had the sleaziest grin I’ve ever seen on his face. “Thanks,” I said with an undisguised disdain.

I went back inside where Josh was still on the phone. After a few minutes, he hung up. “They said he has no warrants, so they can’t stop him.”

“What the fuck?! Did you tell them what we saw?”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for the rest of the shift.