The young boy looked depressed, mentally drained, and defeated. It was the year 2000. I had been staying there with his parents, who moved up here from West Virginia a couple years ago. When I first met him, he was smoking crack with his dad, which blew me away. I mean, my dad got high too, but I couldn't imagine smoking weed with him, let alone crack at the age of 14, or any age for that matter.
I was 20 at the time, and it especially affected me because I was the one who sold it to his dad. I thought to myself, This is some country bumpkin shit, but nonetheless, I felt bad. I was renting a room from his pop for the past two months after his credit ran up so much, he couldn't pay me. Add that on to the fact that he lost his job due to an accident he had at work, for which he was given a drug test. Needless to say, he failed miserably. I don't think it bothered him too much, because he went from being a weekend warrior, to getting high all day, every day. I ended up staying there rent free and didn't have to pay for food. He ran his credit up so bad, that instead of giving me cash, he would pay for things I wanted with his credit cards. After damn near maxing them all out, his wife was on the brink of either leaving him, or calling the cops on me. I expressed my concerns to him, but he assured me she would not call the cops.
At any rate, I started to grow closer to the boy, being as though our rooms were right next to each other. I would have him listening to hip hop of the mid to late 90s, while he had me listen to some classic and punk rock from the same era. What tripped me out was, every song he played for me, I liked. There were also songs he would play for me that I had heard on commercials and had never thought of them being real songs played on the radio. As our connection grew, I started to talk to him about smoking crack at such a young age, or at all for that matter. Explaining to him that we didn't do that shit up here in Jersey. Ironically, we had other drugs in common. we both enjoyed smoking together; that being weed and PCP. I tried to convince him to leave the coke alone and instead, just fuck with weed, wet and alcohol.
Now we come to the night I will not soon forget.
As I said, I was constantly giving his pop credit, and not really getting any cash back made it difficult to re up, so in my eyes, I was coming down on hard times. Looking back it, I had a really crazy mentality back then, considering I had free room and board and food for the past two months. But me being a 19 year old knucklehead, I felt like my back was up against the wall, and I was desperate for a come-up.
On this particular night, I knocked on the young boy's door and opened it, only to be greeted by the saddest expression I've seen yet on his face. I was automatically lead to assume that he must be lovesick. Sure enough, he explained to me that he just found out that his boy, who he considered his best friend, had just screwed his girl and she just called to dump him. I felt so bad for him and instantly thought of a way I could cheer him up. I only had a couple dollars in my pocket, as did he, so we pooled our money together and got a liter of some cheap vodka. After guzzling the bottle down within a matter of minutes, we both started jonesing for some weed. Being as though we spent the last couple dollars we had on alcohol, we were stuck on how to get some good green.
I knew this knucklehead that could usually get his hands on some good stuff and I knew he would be an easy mark to rob. I called him up, telling him I needed half a pound, and set up a meet on the train tracks at a dark, remote location behind the house of my grandparents. Before I left the house, with my head in a swirl, I tucked the empty vodka bottle in the front pocket of my hoodie, satisfied that it would be concealed enough in the dark of the night. As we met up, I could tell he was a little nervous, being as though he wasn't really used to dealing with street cats of my caliber.
I had never asked him for this amount before. Admittedly, for a pretty square dude, his instincts were on point. As we came shoulder to shoulder while walking, I reached into my hoodie and clumsily snatched the bottle out. Unfortunately, it got caught in the corner of my pocket, which gave him enough reaction time to see my drunken swing to his head coming and he ducked underneath it, grabbing onto my waist. Instantly, I dropped the bottle, attempting to put him in a front noose choke. For a good 30 seconds or so, I squeezed as tight as I could, hoping he would tap out before my energy ran out. He was thrashing around, trying to escape my clutches, but the vice tight grip I had, plus, giving everything I had to match my movements with his, I felt pretty confident he would pass out and expire before I got too tired.
Two things were working against me that night, though. First, this guy was a cross country star in high school. We were only a couple of years removed from school and he was known to still run 3-4 miles a day. Secondly, I was extremely out of shape. I had taken to smoking close to ½ a pack of cigarettes a day. Plus, add on to the fact that I had just drunk a whole lot of cheap liquor in a short time, all this extreme activity boosted my high by tenfold. Then there's one other thing. We as humans all have a primal instinct of survival. Something our ancestors passed down to us from the thousands of years of running from Saber tooth tigers and woolly mammoths and other super predators. I could feel my grip starting to loosen ever so slightly as his body started to go limp. I heard a deep guttural sound come from him that startled me as he gave one last desperate attempt to escape my clutches of death.
With one last primal yell and kick, my grip loosened entirely and he wriggled out of my grasp. Completely exhausted, I reached for the bottle which had broken and swung wildly at his back as he was getting up. He was just out of reach, so I only managed to slash a tear in the back of his windbreaker as he gathered himself to run. I was momentarily shocked and amazed to see this guy haul ass at breakneck speed down the tracks, widening the distance between us by the second. With my head pounding, and my heart feeling like it was going to burst through my chest, I was tanked. It wasn't my first attempted murder but it was my first failed attempt and I was extremely disappointed in myself. Not because I didn't kill him, (I hadn't planned to do that) but because I didn't get the damn weed. That would have been a nice come up, and I knew it would have cheered the young boy up.
As I got myself together and prepared for a long non-victorious walk home, I started to chuckle in spite of myself, as I thought how comical this ultimate fail is going to sound when I describe to my young buddy what happened. As I walked in the house, I glanced at the clock and realized I had been gone for an hour. Damn, time flies when you're trying to commit an armed robbery! I was actually in pretty good spirits, considering the circumstances.
I tapped on the young boy's door and listened for the usual call for me to come in. After knocking a little harder the second time, assuming he must have dozed off, I opened the door.
I gasped as I was greeted by his body dangling from a light fixture on the ceiling. Damn, so much for happy endings.
