“Believe Me, I Was There”

by Jamie Kiffel
Illustration by Greg Moutafis

SAIM

It wasn’t that I had anything against Jes. For God’s sakes, I didn’t know she was his fuckin’ sister. If I’d known that, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten involved, but then again I doubt it. She was cute as all hell. And she was smart too, I’m not kidding, she’d read Bukowski and Kerouac and all that shit, so don’t say we had nothing to talk about. I met her Friday night at open bar, and she was being all cute with her curly pigtails and little freshman-flavored lip gloss on, I mean, I just beady-eyed in her general direction and she came right up to introduce herself. So pipe down about the tangled webs we weave bit because I was even wondering how I’d done it, and I’m not one to underestimate my personal prowess.

Alright, so I told her she should come up and see my room. I didn’t have some Gentleman’s Quarterly “How To Score Without Meaning To” flipped open for cranial reference at the time. I had all my creepy old books up there and I thought she would want to see them. Okay, and I also had some weed and maybe I thought she’d want to get a little further into the existential with me. Open our minds, risk some heavy thoughts, see some pretty colors – what do you want, she was cute.

So we’re doing these bong hits with the door closed, and we’re really having an honest-to-God respectably heavy conversation about – fuckin’ I don’t know, Artaud or some shit like that, she’s damn well educated and she knows about a lot of the stuff I’m into these days, which is more than I can say for almost anyone except for Jes, and I’ve already told him that if he was a chick I’d sleep with him. Hell, even if he wasn’t a chick I’d sleep with him, but this is his sister we’re talking about now, not him.

Anyway, she gets all yawny and droopy-eyed, and so do I, and that smoky shit is rising, so I say, why don’t we stretch out up in my loft? We can get comfortable and turn on the fan to get a good breeze coming our way, too. So I help hoist her up this eight-foot plywood ladder and she’s all “ooh, ooh I’m gonna fall” but she doesn’t, and then we’re all cozy with our noses an inch from the asbestos drop ceiling and breathing in the weed and we’re not even screwing around, which is the first time that week for me. After six nights, even the various gods need rest, and maybe I was just feeling a little bit decent. Fuck off, it happens. This girl seemed different, worthy of some respect, I don’t know. So we’re just watching the ceiling do the Sugar Plum Fairy routine on our foreheads, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall or some shit is buzzing through the left speaker of that burned-out crappy stereo Jes never replaced. And then we threw off some clothing because it was hot up there. That’s it.

So then she was thirsty, and that was the shitty part, but I didn’t realize it then, of course. I’d thrown that 6-foot balsa wood super loft together just two nights ago, and I was fuckin’drunk, and I was tired, I was slapping it together to accommodate some woman, and at that sensitive moment, damn it, I wasn’t going to start looking for the nails. Hell, the wood was too fuckin’ thin to hold nails, anyway. It had held me and anyone else goddamn fine until then. So I reach out of the loft for this melted blue Slurpee which is lying just to the side, on top of the bookcase, and she just fucking has to reach over at the same time. And Jesus Christ, we have our own personal fuckin’ natural disaster where the Earth fucking well does move. And then my freakish other roommate, Scooter, comes in.

SCOOTER

There were naked people falling from the sky. I ran into the hallway to see if it was happening there, too.

SAIM

We landed in this big heap on the floor. The weird thing was, like we had this simultaneously deranged thought, we both started laughing. It was unreasonably, utterly and completely stupid, and we were way past freaked out, and our brains were blipping off these weedy little pop rockets. So over all this we both tried to pull our clothes back on.

JENNY

I started laughing because I couldn’t believe he was such a horse’s ass. Not only didn’t he have a clue when I pulled off my clothes in front of his face, hello, I’d heard he had some kind of reputation for getting around, whatever! He isn’t going to win too many converts with the folding bed that instantly collapses from full to twin size during its descent from the stratosphere. So much for sure bets: I owed my roommate fifty bucks for this screw-up. On top of everything else, I was in shock. When I tried to put my shirt on, my arm was bending backwards. I was so blasted that I couldn’t focus on anything but his goddamn philosophy books. Like I actually gave a rat’s ass – I’d just taken a class in Modern Philosophical Pundits in our Global Society or some such dogshit to fulfill a requirement and thought it might actually score me points, which it clearly proved as worthless for, as it did for everything else. To make matters quintessentially deleterious, my brother was coming in the room and my dad was with him. I’m the baby out of seven kids, so you can probably imagine how my dad was taking this.

MR. GRENN

So, she was underage, but just hardly. So she made a bad choice. I have six others. It’s not impossible to make more. Jes just watched; I don’t think he minded.

JES

Two people. Both very close to me. Smelling weird. Naked. I feel highly uncomfortable talking about it without a therapist present.

SAIM

So the fuckin’ paramedics come and we go the hospital, and she’s in the next room, and fuckin’, her dad comes in and is like clenching his teeth because he obviously wants to rip my balls off, and I didn’t even get any for God’s sakes, for once in a week I didn’t try – I was a fuckin’gentleman. Maybe he could tell because he just sort of nodded and didn’t say anything, and then thank God the doctor came in and the parent obviously wasn’t going to cause more injuries while the medical staff was there. And I’m falling apart and I’m about to be killed and sexually frustrated and wasted, and then I couldn’t believe what the doctor did.

DOCTOR

I examined the young woman first. She had sustained two broken ribs, a broken wrist, and a sprained ankle. The young man sustained a broken arm, a broken rib, and a mild concussion. Neither one arrived properly clothed. After realizing what must have transpired to cause such injuries, I took it upon myself to speak directly with the young gentleman.

SAIM

He fuckin’ congratulated me.