Read Online Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood by Hollis Gillespie - Free Book Online

with the rest of the crowd, envying him. God, I wish I could do that , I thought. I wish so badly to be able to let loose with my voice. I wished it so strongly I even started to see it. Wow, look at me , I thought. Look at me singing , look at me dancing , look at me jumping, running, soaring . Look at me standing up and shouting out what’s in my heart! Then I could feel it welling up. I swear I could feel it coming out! I could feel myself flying along!
    Then the train came and cut me off. I boarded it with the rest of the horde, having been reverted back to my basic self, having been stopped cold again, with nothing in my hands but something caught in my heart.



I Can Fly
    Isn’t there some kind of age limit on acid trips? You’d think that by the time you turn forty or so you’d graduate to prescribed drugs and become a legitimate, respectable junkie like a few First Lady runners-up I could name. But Lary is at least five hundred years old—or older than me anyway, not that you’d ever know it by his behavior, which landed him in the hospital yesterday with a concussion and cracked ribs and probably brain damage too, not that you’d be able to tell right off. Essentially what happened is that Lary took acid, climbed the scaffolding inside his warehouse, and flung himself headfirst off the top just like a junkie. His account will differ from mine because I was not actually there, but since he was all hopped up on drugs neither was he if you think about it. Still, he insists he slipped and did not fling himself, and that he did not climb the scaffolding because of a bad trip but because of his bad roof, which is falling down and needs to be fixed.
    “Don’t give me that,” I said. “You thought you could fly, didn’t you?”
    Lary knows I’m afraid of acid, because as a kid I totally bought into that tax-funded traveling sideshow of ex-addicts who used to visit grade schools and host antidrug rallies, which essentially entailed freaking everybody out with stories of their former junkie escapades. These were not just trite little tales about hippies who thought they could fly. No. For example, one guy took the microphone and told the audience about his drug buddy who had a bad trip one day and barfed out his entire tongue onto the floor. That’s right, one second his friend was fine with his tongue attached to the back of his throat and everything, then he took some drugs and bleh , there his whole tongue was on the linoleum, raw and quivering like a piece of liver.
    Looking back, I realize that’s probably not even possible (right?), but for an eight-year-old it painted a pretty graphic picture of what to avoid, and now I can at least look at myself and say I didn’t end up a tongueless junkie. Too bad I couldn’t, at least in part, extend the same compliment to my best friend. In all, I’m really glad Lary didn’t die, because knowing the condition of his place, a fall like that could have easily meant impaling his brain on a big railroad spike. We’re pretty close, considering we have little in common. He is the oldest in a brood of ten siblings falteringly brought up by a severely God-fearing mother and a philandering father, and I am the middle kid from a much smaller family that was headed by my mother, an atheist missile scientist and part-time petty klepto with broken aspirations of becoming a beautician, and my father, a boozing unemployed trailer salesman who once had huge dreams for himself, only his fears turned out to be much bigger.
    Lary once told me he spent very little time at home while growing up, instead choosing to wander the woods behind his house. That’s how I like to picture him, as a child running with his arms outstretched in total solitude, gleeful to be free of the emotionaloppression of his home. My own home held a similar aversion for me as a kid. At first, my chain-smoking parents fought with the ferocity of rival tigers, each blaming the other for the fizzle their hopes