The memory comes fast and furious like an Alabama storm. How I used to drive you to the trailer park past Plantation Hills so you could fuck men for 35 dollars a pop, migrant workers that lived two too many to a bedroom. Were you even 18 then? You’d give me 10 dollars to drive you; 20 if I said no and really meant it. A couple quick shooters and you could have enough to last the weekend. The best rocks were dense. Ribbed like slickrock, the moon rocks you buy at the hippy store, the ones meant to purify your chakras. I never saw them, never asked to; by the time they got around me, they were broken-down pebbles wrapped in tinfoil to burn.

You said being high felt like stillness. I told you you were too good for this life. I told you that you should die because you thought that The Sea and Cake cover of “Sound and Vision” was better than the original. I didn’t really mean it. I drove you to score. I wondered if you’d have a tragic end like in the movies. They only want you when you’re 17; when you’re 21, you’re no fun, you sang in the car. Our lives felt tragic, and maybe they were. I bought into the romance of it. Made it feel like a movie. This was the only way I knew how to support you. Can you forgive me?

I remember when you tied me to your daddy’s bedpost, making the knots so tight I couldn’t move. You were sick of me saying no. My boner was a stand-in for yes. I didn’t have the words to ask you how you lost your virginity, the words to tell you that even though I didn’t want you like that, you were the closest to desire I had ever found. In my mind, you had always had sex. Was I even 18 then? If I hadn’t balked and begged for you to stop, I would have been a father—I’m sure of it. When people ask me about my Coney Island, I don’t have the heart to tell them; this is it. The cosmos aren’t consensual. Real life breaks you. In my dream, you would never have become a junkie. We would have named our kid Oscar. You would tell everyone that a gay man got you pregnant, and I would get so mad about it that one day we’d do it all over again. This was before the johns, when you were just a teen cokehead, a high school dropout living off the glamor of your absent daddy’s shame, before I drove you around to score, before I refused then let up just to refuse again. When it was one of your other gays who took you to your shifts at McDonald’s, to your dealers’ houses, to church. You who always needed a ride. Who was always going somewhere. Anywhere but up, you’d say.

Of course I know what Oscar Wilde has to say about stars. How many times did you recite that quote? Sneaking through the wooded trails during third period to go to my house and smoke cigarettes, coasting along country roads to your thirty-something-year-old boyfriend’s trailer in the sticks, making a home under the big Christmas tree in the mall. The cover of foliage, the hood of the car, the metal and plastic of the artificial fir: there was always a barrier between us and the night sky. It was something between protection and curse.

The first time you got arrested, the sky felt so big, it was suffocating. When I moved away, and my parents drove me the three thousand miles to the Pacific, I did nothing but encounter the mordant blankness of it, letting the pain strike me until it turned to numbness.

In my half-life since, I have learned to look at stars. You’ve got to take in the vastness like a punch to the gut. Consider your smallness. Let it mull over you. Stars have half-lives that we can’t even fathom.

Somewhere up there, Oscar is turning 18. We used to say the best die young, but eighteen years later, I feel like I’m just beginning to live. Back then, we were in the gutter, sure, but it was you who made me really look up. The absence of you, but yes, it was you.

The next time we cross paths, can you tell me if you feel the same?
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C.R. Calabria is a writer from coastal Alabama. A long-time participant in Phase I clinical trials, Cory lives in New Orleans, where he’s at work on his debut nonfiction book—a cultural history of medicine told through the story of the human research subject. You can follow his ruminations on health and pharmacy on his Substack, Pharmascenery.

Artwork by Dinty W. Moore