mikey montoni

See You Next Fall

Cassandra Miller is a girl who lives in her parents’ basement in Bay Heights, Brooklyn, New York. The third stair in Cassandra Miller’s basement in Bay Heights, Brooklyn had the loudest creak. Whenever anyone was coming up or down, they were fanfared with a squealing of wood the likes of which I have never encountered elsewhere. That day as we descended in a neat single file, the creak was a final cry of warning. It was the last protest from the outside world before Cassandra Miller looked at me expectantly, and I followed her down the stairs.

Overcast afternoon light streamed in through tiny windows near the ceiling, casting a gray glow across a dark room before Cassandra Miller made her way to the light switch. She lingered on it for a moment, before flipping it, bathing the room in a monochrome purple that took all the edges out of everything. We could hear the street through the locked screen door, an escape route blocked off. The walls were beige, and I knew all too well how she hated them. One Friday we sat on her couch that was also her bed and bought tapestries online, big blue psychedelic things that swathed the walls and ceilings in never-ending patterns and shapes. It would be quaint and charming in any other room, in any other basement, but something about it here felt hollow and tired. It felt like a display, smoke and mirrors, false intrigue to distract the viewer from the obscenely mundane coloring of the drywall. The big Fender amp that I loved was wheeled against a wall, unplugged and silent. Her drum kit sat beneath the windows, a dark monument to the band that hadn’t rehearsed in months, cloaked in shadows, not even the purple touching it.

The five of them sat in an open circle on the floor, passing a joint in the way that a group of stoners will do regardless of how well they know each other. We had been friends since Cassandra Miller and I had started dating. They were semi-professional deviants, a tight-knit and intimidating group of gangly older kids. They had freedom, experience, and money, and they always smelled like good weed and bad cologne. They were loud and brash, but they were smart. I wanted to be like them, but at my core I was the antithesis of them. I, a fat white kid from the suburbs with protective parents and no money, could never dress or act like them. I sure as hell could try, though.

Cassandra Miller and I sat on the couch that was also her bed, uncomfortably close together, completing the ellipse of smokers but looking down on them from our cushioned throne. When the joint burned down, we all shared glances, and Cassandra Miller looked at me. I looked at her. I didn’t say anything, or maybe I did, but she kissed me and I left to close the door to the basement. Her father met my bloodshot eyes as I did, sitting in their living room with a Pabst in one hand and the other on his dog. He liked me well enough. I think he knew well before I did that I was in over my head. There was something peculiar about the interactions we shared, an unspoken camaraderie between us. I wouldn’t learn until later that it was the bond between people his daughter was trampling. He knew, to some degree, what was going on in the basement, and he gave me a nod. I didn’t know what he meant, so I smiled and closed the door. The stair creaked again as I went downstairs, reminding me that I had sealed my fate.

Cassandra Miller’s bong made the rounds when I returned, and I had never used one before. She did it for me, lighting the weed and pulling it after entirely too long. My lungs were too full of smoke to say “no.” I coughed and spluttered, my head spinning. Her friends laughed at me, and I laughed with them, at me. I stood up and went to the screen door, breathing in the filthy city air in an attempt to ground myself. It wasn’t soothing; the acid pollution stung my lungs, already torn open from the smoke. I pulled out a pack of Cassandra Miller’s cigarettes from my pocket, ones she no longer needed because she was trying to quit, and I smoked one because I figured it couldn’t do any more harm than had already been done.

When I returned, it was starting. The sheet was strange to me. I had expected something, but I wasn’t sure what. I decided to forget it. Cassandra Miller handed me a tab. I thought about nothing, and I took it. I was focused on nothing, the room existing in sharp clarity around me, my eyesight oversaturated in purple as the lines of the floor and walls defined themselves in my peripheral. She met my eye and opened her mouth, placing the tab on her tongue and closing it, staring at me expectantly. The lack of focus shrunk into tight tunnel vision, her pale face reflecting the bright purple as I mimicked her. The ritual was finished, and now we just had to wait.

We listened to music, soft and gentle indie rock, and we talked at length about The Smiths, the sound of voices and guitars and bass and drums starting to sound unfamiliar and alien as we called Morrissey a Nazi and said that Modest Mouse was actually Johnny Marr’s best guitar work and why didn’t he stay in that band and, well, why would anyone when you have Smiths checks rolling in. I laid back on the couch that was also her bed, and I looked up at the ceiling. The conversation was starting to fade; I no longer cared about whether Seventeen Seconds was better than Pornography. On her ceiling, Cassandra Miller had placed a tapestry of a mandala, which she had tie-dyed purple. In the purple light, it looked like nothing, like a worn-out flag of some purple country on some purple continent on a purple world orbiting a purple star in the deepest reaches of Purple Space where all the people were purple.

Cassandra Miller laid next to me on the couch that was also her bed, her hands on me. I didn’t like it, so I reached to move them, but nothing was there. I could feel her touching me, hand sliding down my stomach slowly, but her arms were at her sides. I must have looked distressed because she asked me what was wrong. I told her I didn’t know. The hand kept creeping down, sliding under my clothes, caressing every insecurity, feeling every self-inflicted scar on my hips. I think it was trying to reassure me, but I didn’t want that and I couldn’t tell it “no.” I couldn’t tell her “no.” So I didn’t and eventually it was over, but I felt dirty afterward. I wanted to leave, so I stood up and it felt heavy, so I gave up and lay back down. If the rest were saying anything, it was static; all I could hear was the song, soft synth chords, a quiet mumble, hi-hat taps.

It seemed like hours passed. Synth chords faded into droning feedback, gears grinding in the cosmic machine as I struggled to find a point to my existence. It was an unprovoked and thoroughly unwelcome bout of nihilism, arriving out of nothing and demanding that I quantify the value of my life. I thought about it for a moment, which was actually an hour, and then I forgot the question, so I stopped wondering and looked at Cassandra Miller. She was smiling and happy and she kissed me, and it didn’t feel like anything. One of the stoners asked her who I was and she said, “That’s Mikey! That’s my boyfriend!” but that felt empty, too. The “he’s” and “him’s” rang out in every sentence she said, convincing this drugged and depressed teen that he did, in fact, know who I was. The more that she spoke, the more I realized that the person she knew wasn’t me. My stomach lurched as I felt my identity being carried away into the biting New York wind, leaving me vulnerable and alone on the couch in Brooklyn.

People started to leave one at a time. I couldn’t read the clock, because it had stood up and left the room, so I’m not sure what time it was, but they started to leave and I was scared to be alone in the aggressive purple nightmare of abasement. I whispered this to Cassandra Miller and she grabbed me and held me, and I didn’t like the way she gripped my throat, but I didn’t pull away because it was better than nothing.

I closed my eyes to get away. Music washed over me, pouring in through my mouth and nose, all other senses overcome by the sounds of lo-fi rock music. Suffocating in every sense, I lay motionless, wrestling with the creeping suspicion that I was not safe here. I could feel eyes burning into me, so I started to slowly open mine, hoping to catch whoever it was that was staring. When I finally regained sight, it was abstract. The room’s edges bled into one another, morphing and bending into unnatural permutations of drywall and studs. The drum kit was a twisted, molten heap of metal and wood, an unholy crossbreed of machine and nature. Someone was breathing on my neck and I knew it was Cassandra Miller, and I knew that she wanted to fuck me then and I didn’t want to. I was done lying down and taking it. I was done being used as a source of cheap bodily pleasure. So I closed my eyes again, the most passive way I knew how to protect myself. The reality of my sudden resistance a bit much to stomach, I slipped back into the black, taking comfort in my belief that the drugs (or the people on them) couldn’t hurt me in the darkness.

I started to remember things with my eyes closed. I had to question for a moment if they were my memories; they were hazy, distorted, faceless. The first thing I saw was a pair of headlights barreling towards me as I was held in someone’s arms. The first thing I heard was the screeching of tires as the car pulled to a stop, feet from me. Who held me? Who cares? The next thing I saw was a faceless woman holding my hand, asking me to walk faster, the sign had changed. The next thing I felt was a gust of wind on my back as a car zipped past, its metallic frame looming over my squat and pudgy insignificance.

They kept coming; six years old, playing football on the street I grew up on, one of the last happy experiences with my father. Eight years old, the new street, learning how to ride my bike. Eleven years old, trying to meet my mother to be picked up after school. Thirteen years old, sitting in the parking lot alone, discovering new music. Fourteen years old, laying in the street with my first love. Fifteen years old, visiting New York City. The number of times I had nearly been struck by a moving car, flashing like the world’s most chilling and morbid Rocky montage, mortality and fate put to film and proven.

I spent most of my days wanting to die, wishing I had never been given this chance. I was owned by depression, constant wear of life taking its toll on me, my mind deteriorating slowly as I fought to stay alive. There were days when I would cut myself, little razor marks on my hips, to give the pain sense and reason. Why, then, could I not have been killed? Almost every week for sixteen miserable years, a car had threatened to send my fragile frame flying into concrete. What cruel power would intervene on every single occasion to prevent me from the one thing that I so desperately wanted?

After hours of this cosmic torment, I opened my eyes again. The room was detuned, blurry and discolored enough to disorient me. I was alone with Cassandra Miller and she was lying with her head on my chest, and her arms were wrapped around me. I thought she was trying to comfort me or maybe just comfort herself, but there was no love in her vise grip. It was all possessive, all jealousy, all self-hatred, all sadness, and I was the poor person who happened to walk into her life and take it all.

I brushed off her embrace and went to stand by the screen door. It was dark now, and I took another cigarette and smoked it, taking my time away from the couch and clearing my head. The smoke brought clarity, tying me back to the world, and I began to level out. No longer was I spiraling out into the void; the pilot had regained consciousness, the cabin had repressurized. I looked back at Cassandra Miller, sitting on the couch with hooded eyes, a snake hunting down a little brown mouse. I shrunk into myself, shoulders slouched, face gaunt, and I looked out the door. I unlocked it, and I left.

I sat on her neighbor’s doorstep for two hours in silence, not listening to music or saying anything, just reflecting. The night air was cool and it smelled like fried food and spilled beer, and it cut through my denim jacket and prodded every single wound that the night had ripped open. With a hesitant sigh, I looked up at the sky and I saw no stars, nothing above me. Just a navy expanse, dim and dismal over the greatest city in the world.

I started walking, one foot in front of the other, the world swimming around me as I climbed the stairs to the subway station and waited on the platform. The greenish subway lights made my reflection look angry and hollow, with no eyes. Just dark, sharp shadows and pale, sweaty skin. One other person sat in the car, an old man with a large gray beard. He had a powerful build, his chin hidden beneath a voluptuous beard, which rested on the front of his stained Yankees jersey, and he sat with his chin resting on his chest and his eyes closed. He didn’t acknowledge me when I got on, and he didn’t say a word or even move during the ride. He seemed intensely focused, or maybe just asleep. Even though the man was there, I still felt alone. His presence wasn’t comforting; in fact, he was hardly present at all. On the train in the busiest city in the world, I was alone.

The drugs I’d taken had twisted, cut and pasted every neuron in my brain. The order wasn’t incorrect; it was just unfamiliar. I looked at the man for quite a while, and I could not convince my brain that I was not alone. The loneliness, as much as the drugs, had changed me. It turned me into a desperate husk, clinging to anything and everything that made me feel something. It pervaded the way that I thought, lingering on every action I took like the smell of stale tobacco on an old jacket.

The world has a nasty habit of isolating people who don’t conform. People who aren’t cookie-cutter little boys and girls ready to be raised right and get cast off from society, left to form their own communities of punks and queers and addicts and losers. Cassandra Miller and I did not conform. We were punks, we were queers, we were addicts, we were losers, and we met each other at our most desperate and lonely; we used each other and abused each other, developing codependency merely for each other’s presence. It separated me from the world. I couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel utterly alone in a crowd, or what it was like to be truly vulnerable with someone. All I remembered was hurt, solitude, and then acceptance. My gaze lifted from the man and settled on my own pallid reflection in the train window. I forced my brain to silence itself and listened to the sound of the wheels on the tracks, wishing it all to be over.

I arrived home in silence. My parents sat in the living room and they greeted me in monotone, eyes ripping from the TV to follow me as I walked up the stairs silently. I walked down the hall, staring down at my feet, picking out every grain in the wood. I entered my room and closed the door behind me, exhaling softly, and I picked up my notebook. I wrote things down, scattered memories, and I tried not to leave anything out.