You Suck: A Love Story

for lighting fireplaces, he sparked that magnificent mama-jama up and bubbled away like a scuba diver having an asthma attack. When he could hold no more, he raised the bong, poured some water on the ground, and croaked, “To Blue,” which came out in a perfect smoke ring, the sight of which brought tears to everyone’s eyes.
    “To Blue,” everyone repeated as they placed one hand on the bong and tipped a bit out of their beers.
    “To Broo, my nigga,” said Troy Lee’s grandma, who had insisted upon joining the ceremony once she realized there would be firecrackers.
    “She will be avenged,” said Lash.
    “And we’ll get our fucking money back,” said Jeff, the big jock.
    “Amen,” the Animals said.
    They had decided on a nondenominational ceremony, as Barry was a Jew, Troy Lee was a Buddhist, Clint was an Evangelical, Drew was a Rastafarian, Gustavo was a Catholic, and Lash and Jeff were heathen stoners. Gustavo had been called in to work that day because someone had to be in the store as long as the front was only boarded up with plywood, so in deference to his beliefs, they had bought some incense and holders and placed a picket fence of smoldering joss sticks around the edible panty. The incense also worked within Troy and Grandma’s Buddhist tradition, and Lash pointed out during the ceremony that although they have their differences otherwise, all gods like a good-smellin’ ho.
    “Amen!” said the Animals again.
    “And they’re handy for lightin’ firecrackers off of,” added Jeff as he bent over an incense stick and set a string cracking.
    “Hallelujah!” said the Animals.
    Each offered to share some kind of memory of Blue, but all of their stories quickly degenerated to orifices and squishiness, and no one wanted to go there in front of Troy’s grandma, so instead they threw firecrackers at Clint while he read from the Twenty-third Psalm.
    Before they cracked the second case of beer, it was decided that after dark, three of them-Lash, Troy Lee, and Barry-would take Blue from Lash’s apartment, load her into the back of Barry’s station wagon, and take her out in the middle of the Bay in Barry’s Zodiac. (Barry was the diver of the bunch, and had all the cool aquatic stuff. They’d used his spearguns to help take down the old vampire.) Lash braced himself as he opened the apartment door, but to his surprise, there was no smell. He led Barry and Troy into the bedroom, and together they wrestled the rolled-up rug out of the closet.
    “It’s not heavy enough,” Barry said.
    “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Troy said, trying furiously to unroll the rug.
    Finally Lash reached down, grabbed the edge of the rug, and whipped it up over his head. There was a thudding sound against the far wall, followed by the jingle of metal, like coins settling.
    The three Animals stood and stared.
    “What are those?” Asked Barry.
    “Earrings,” answered Troy. Indeed, there were seven earrings settling on the hardwood floor.
    “Not those. Those!” Barry nodded toward two clear, cantaloupe-sized, gelatinous lozenges that quivered on the floor like stranded jellyfish.
    Lash shivered. “I’ve seen them before. My brother used to work in a plant in Santa Barbara that made them.”
    “What the fuck are they?” Said Troy, squinting through a drunken haze.
    “Those are breast implants,” Lash said.
    “What are those wormy things?” asked Barry. There were two translucent sluglike blobs of something stuck to the rug near the edge.
    “Looks like window caulk,” said Lash. He noticed that there was a fine blue powder near the edge of the rug. He ran his hand over it, pinched some on his fingers, and sniffed it. Nothing.
    “Where’d she go?” asked Barry.
    “No idea,” said Lash.

20 – It’s a Wonderful Life
    Gustavo Chavez had been born the seventh child of a brick maker in a small village in the state ofMichoacan,Mexico. At eighteen he married a local girl, the daughter of a farmer, herself a seventh child, and at twenty, with his second child on the way, he crossed the border into the United States, where he lived with a cousin in Oakland, along with a score of other relatives, and worked grueling, twelve-hour days as a laborer, making enough to feed himself and send more money home to his family than he could possibly have made in his father’s brickyard. He did this because it was the responsible and right thing to do, and because he had been raised a good Catholic man who, like his