Tracy went with her dad to visit her grandparents in Kentucky. I would miss her for two weeks, but I was also looking forward to the time alone. It always seemed I needed a base of isolation to which I could retreat and gather myself. I felt lost without that and I hadn’t had anything like it since I met Tracy.

I took the Saturday off that Tracy left with her dad. I stayed up with her until 4am, watching bad movies and talking about anything and everything while bathed in the warm, orange light of soft tungsten bulbs. Sometimes we’d pause to make fun of whatever movie we were watching, especially when Back to the Beach came on.

“Oh my God, this fucking movie is making me have a flashback or something.”

“This song is awful, Darren! Hey, isn’t that the guy from the Sonic commercials?”

“Holy Jesus it is! Frankie Avalon! He probably fed the crew for this cheap piece of shit with free Sonic burgers!”

“Yeah, he’s so desperate for money, he invites all his rich Hollywood friends over for a party and then serves them Sonic!”

“No shit! That’s probably how this movie got made. They all came up with it while sitting around a sauna eating a burger and tots.”

“And malts.”

“Look at Annette Funicello. She looks like a piece of rubber! They probably had to dope her up on PCP to get her to do this. Somebody needs to be beaten with a hose for committing this crime to celluloid.”

I lay down on the floor, with my head in Tracy’s lap while she ran her fingers through my hair. She knew the perfect place on the back of my head to massage. The feeling, judging by its reaction, was the same as that for a cat when its back is scratched near the base of its tail.

In a moment of quiet, I realized how fast the hours had streaked past. Time used to beat so slowly, like the pulse of my heart on 120mgs of hydrocodone. Now it was pecking away like the ticks of a Geiger counter dropped on Hiroshima after the Summer of ’45. I also realized I was no longer thinking in terms of I, me, mine. Quietly, deep in my subconscious, things had evolved into we, us, ours.

Tracy drove us to my place and came upstairs, to the third floor apartment to “say goodnight.” I opened the door to a full-scale pixie invasion. The apartment was freezing—the thermostat had been set to 60 degrees. The pixies were meandering around the apartment, confused, covered with sweat and shirtless.

I looked around with incredulity, “What in the name of sweet Jesus?”

Tracy tightened her grip on my hand, “This is insane.”

In the kitchen, a couple of pixies had the blender going—they were making pancakes with grape juice. In the living room, where Tracy and I sat on the floor to watch in disbelief, pixies were making collages, running in and out to the balcony, playing with a laser pointer and a stethoscope and listening to Blind Melon at full volume.

Some pixie I’d never seen before ran up to me, shoved his arm out toward me and injected himself with liquid pixie dust. After the injection, he threw his head back, took a deep breath and moaned, his lower jaw quivering orgasmically. After mere seconds, he turned to Tracy and repeated the maneuver.

I pushed him away, “Dude, get that shit away from her.”

He repeated the process for Dustin, busy making a collage. It reminded me of a cat rubbing against furniture to mark it as its own. After his ritual, the pixie walked around the apartment babbling about how he absolutely had to get downtown. It seemed to be a matter of life and death with him.

Tracy and I never managed to “say goodbye.” Something about the pixies took it out of us. I ended up in my room, with the door closed and my cat hiding under the blankets I had piled on the floor as my bed.

It was the first chunk of time I’d really had to be alone and reflect in quite some time. My living situation was starting to depress me. The more time I spent completely sober, the more annoying the pixies became. The gas station was becoming an issue as well. I could never give Tracy the kind of life I wanted working there. A life of squalor was fine and exciting for me, but I wouldn’t dream of putting her there. The only way I could see out of it was finishing three years of school. It seemed like such a long time and I was already bored with it. I’d barely managed to hold on to some enthusiasm my last semester—mostly riding the high I got from Tracy. But I found myself immensely enjoying the summer and not having to take one pointless test after another. I decided long ago that freedom meant more to me than almost anything. School just seemed to drain that away.

* * *

Dustin was cutting up various pornographic magazines with which Toad had stocked the “porn table” in the back room. His intense concentration was broken only by the occasional customer. “Man, this is a masterpiece!” he exclaimed, admiring the collage he was working on. It was a picture of a vagina with a midget’s head pasted over the clitoris.

Dustin had the far island that night. Over my years at the station, I had made several interesting observations about human behavior. The far island was always the slowest and I noticed its patrons usually seemed less confident and drove lower end cars, while the people who used the near island seemed to have better cars and often came in wearing suits or other office clothes. I generally thought the people who used the far island were of better character. A ’60s blue skylark pulled into the far island. It was Ms. Whipple looking inside impatiently awaiting service.

“Ms. Whipple is waiting for you, dude.” I informed Dustin.

“Oh, fuck!” he snarled, “Goddamnit!”

He stood up quickly and swayed a bit before making his way to Ms. Whipple, his hair flying in all directions and his wild, sunken eyes aflame.

I watched with interest as Dustin grappled with Ms. Whipple’s hood. He finally opened it, but in his psychosis he hadn’t planned to get a towel beforehand. He turned to get a rag from the squeegee bucket and the hood fell shut again. I could see his lips moving quickly in what I imagined was a stream of obscenities that would make the Exorcist sound like a Disney movie. I went to help him, otherwise Ms. Whipple could be out there all night.

I had been at the station long enough to know the trick to getting Ms. Whipple’s hood open, so I manipulated the lever with my thumb and moved the hood from side to side until it popped free. I held it open while Dustin checked the oil, which looked like chocolate milk from the mixture of radiator fluid in it. Dustin grimaced and shoved the stick violently back into the block.

He walked around to the window, grumbling, “It’s low. It’s not even showing on the stick.”

After a muffled response from inside the car, Dustin trampled back to the building, disgusted. He returned with four quarts of Pennzoil 10w-30. He filled the engine with oil, testing the dipstick after each quart, and I noticed a strange man standing at the divider between our station and the Amoco next door. He was thirtyish with short blonde hair, a mustache, and wild blue eyes. He stood there watching us and laughing to himself. He behaved like he knew us. Every time I glanced down at him, he chuckled and nodded his head.

“Do you know that guy?” I asked Dustin.

He finished up with the oil and we shut the hood, “No. What the hell is he doing?”

“I don’t know, dude.”

We walked back toward the building, Dustin carrying Ms. Whipple’s Phillips 66 credit card and two unused quarts of oil. The freak next door kept watching us, chuckling and nodding until we got inside. Dustin ran the card through the credit card machine and waited for the receipt to churn out of the printer. He spit on the card and shoved his finger into his nose, digging out a large glop of mucous which he wiped on the card. He wiped the card on a blue paper towel used to stock the squeegee buckets, so as not to make it so obvious the card had been defiled.

“Dude!” I shook my head.

Poor Ms. Whipple. She was annoying at times, but she didn’t deserve that. Dustin took a side route on his way back from Mrs. Whipple and began talking to the freak at Amoco. “Oh God,” I thought, knowing no good could possibly come of this. Sure enough, the freak appeared in the window next to Dustin and followed him inside.

“HI!” he beamed. He was wearing a light-blue jacket. He had a Walkman in the pocket and earphones around his neck.

“What’s up, dude?” I greeted him.

His eyes were wide and sharp, “YOU CAN CALL ME JACK!”

“Hey Jack.”

This was just the sort of person Dustin could identify with, “So, Jack, what’s going on?”

Jack’s eyes widened even more, “OH MAN, I JUST GOT OUT OF PRISON. PROBATION. I STOLE A BUNCH OF MONEY FROM MY FATHER-IN-LAW’S BUSINESS. TOO MUCH COKE, MAN! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Dustin’s eyes lit up.

“I FUCKING HATE FAGS, MAN! THEY THINK I HAVE SCHIZOPHRENIA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Ohhhh. Wow. I watched this exchange in disbelief.

“Wait, the fags think you have schizophrenia?” Dustin asked, genuinely concerned.

“NO MAN! THE DOCTORS! THEY DON’T GET IT MAN!”

“Fucking doctors,” Dustin agreed.

“THE CATS UNDERSTAND MAN! I WALKED OVER HERE FROM MY SISTERS!”

“Cats?” I asked, wondering what person could possibly understand this character. Was he talking about the guys at Amoco? They were a bit off—and insanely jealous of us. This guy could be a plant.

“I’M STAYING WITH MY SISTER! HER CATS GET IT!”

I gasped audibly. He had been referring to actual cats, not “cats” as slang…

“What do they get?” Dustin asked, getting sucked deeper and deeper into this madman’s world.

“A WHOLE BUNCH OF SHIT, MAN! I JUST WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE! LEFT ALONE WITH MY TUNES!” He stroked his headphones.

“Dude, you probably ought to go,” I said. Getting nervous with a giant wad of cash in my pocket.

“WHAT ARE YOU WITH THE FBI MAN?? YOU GOT THAT PAPER THERE WRITING DOWN EVERYTHING I SAY! ”

“Well, I haven’t touched…” I stopped, realizing I was allowing myself to get sucked into this person’s delusions, “just leave.”

“I’M FUCKING OUTTA HERE MAN! BOTTOM LINE, YOU PEOPLE ARE FUCKED UP!”

Jack left hurriedly and scurried back down toward Amoco. Dustin shrieked as yet another wave of anxiety gripped his body. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be my last dealing with Jack.