One

I could never remember the name of the town, but it was somewhere in upstate New York. I had driven across the border without a driver’s license and barely enough money to pay for gas to get there. Nico told me to meet him at the club where he was working as a bouncer. It could have been any small town with a mostly abandoned Main Street. The club was a basement that had almost no people in it. After a quick hello, he said we could leave. He took me to his parents’ house the next day. It was nearly derelict. The second floor had no walls left and looked abandoned except for a few stray boxes. He told me when he was a kid his brother duct taped him to a tree, covered him in honey, and left him there, covered in ants. It didn’t look like anyone had lived in the house for decades, but when we went back downstairs his mother was there at the table. She was obese in a way it seems Americans only ever are and didn’t seem to notice him. He asked if I wanted a potato sandwich, which seemed weird to me. I ate fish then. He was a vegetarian. And poor. So ate things like hash browns on toast pilfered from the kitchen of a woman he said was his mother. I had doubts. She still hadn’t seen us, even though we were right there, waiting for his toast, only a few feet away. I started to get nervous if this was a complete stranger’s house. Then he said hi to her and she looked up in recognition at him, and I believed she was his mother.

At least that’s how I remember it. I don’t remember things so well, since I don’t still have a bullet lodged in my brain.