the stories of chris |
Issue 15
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Chris Kerny arrived on the campus of Cypress Academy without pomp or circumstance. It was the beginning of junior year, his second, my first. There was no envoy of black SUV’s like the ones that carried the children of celebrities, no collegiate coaches carefully protecting him from injury as if he were a star recruit destined for professional athletics, no dollies filled to the brim with designer luggage like the ones that arrived for the fashion forward foreign heiresses. He was just some guy. He used to tell this story about how, on that first move in day junior year, after his parents left, he smoked a blunt out in the open next to the practice football field. According to Chris, the dean of student affairs was walking his dog right by the field at the same time and caught him with smoke coming out of his ears. As the story goes, the dean showed Chris mercy that day because it was his first day in a new environment, and decided they could keep the incident between themselves, so long as Chris now understood the rules of aforementioned new environment. Chris agreed, and promised that that would be his last blunt until he was back in his bedroom in Cambridge. It was not. I always told Chris he should be a writer, he always refused, for reasons I do not immediately remember. I do wish he had taken my advice though, he told these stories much better than I do.
My first inclination as to Chris’ cause of death was wrong, slightly. I had suspected overdose. Delany Smith, originally from Beverly Hills, was the first to let me know that he had died, but she did not know the details, so I hung up on her in search of the truth. I went to social media. The outpouring of tributary messages that he would never see was just beginning, but the only post with some information was a screenshot of a news article posted by Veronica Hampstead. I fucked Veronica back during junior year, took her virginity actually. She was a porky number, with a thick Boston accent and collegiate hockey aspirations; it was not my proudest orgasm. Chris teased me for that conquest endlessly, but I think he would have fucked Veronica too, given the opportunity. From her screenshot I found the full article, and sat up in bed as I read the harrowing details of my friend’s murder. It had just happened early in the morning the day before. He was home from the University of Vermont on Thanksgiving break. As my semester trudged on, I wondered silently why their break was so long, goddamn. He was hanging out with one of his public school friends, they had gotten a bottle of vodka. Sounded just like Chris. He used to fill empty water bottles up with vodka and sip them in class until he was forced to excuse himself to the bathroom and vomit. I knew I was reading the correct article. Naturally, after buying the bottle, he contacted a drug dealer in pursuit of prescription pills. Undoubtedly Xanax, his drug of choice. Back in school he would return home every weekend, and every Sunday night he came back to school bearing “xans”. Every Friday afternoon I would ask him to bring some back for me, offering to pay a premium, and every Monday morning he would tell me that he totally had brought some back for me, but, unfortunately, he had taken them all the night before, immediately upon return to campus. It didn’t matter how many there were. “It’s a compulsion,” he would tell me, and I would laugh it off, thinking only about the drugs I didn’t have. They met up with the drug dealer at a local park, the public school friend stayed behind the park’s fence as Chris completed the transaction. Allegedly, in a drunken stupor, Chris smashed the bottle of vodka and bum rushed the drug dealer with a shard of broken glass as a weapon. The drug dealer, armed with a real knife, fought his attacker’s advances until he stood victorious, stained by another man’s blood. I imagine it happened something like a great bull fight: my pale, portly friend, red faced, angrily charging at this matador of a drug dealer while the dealer strategically stabbed him nine times in the face, neck, and upper chest until the mighty, mighty bull keeled over in defeat. I don’t remember when exactly I met Chris Kerny, but it had to have been early on junior year because by the turn of the seasons we were hanging out almost everyday. We would lift weights together, and then, back at the dorm, he would offer me a lip-full of chewing tobacco if I agreed to shower in the stall next to his. We showered with nothing but the thin tile wall between our wet, naked, teenage bodies, and we talked about everything we could think of while we spat brown slugs of tobacco tinted saliva down the drains at our feet. We talked about the Red Sox, what girls we wanted to fuck, what music we liked to listen to. We didn’t hangout much outside of those weekday workouts and showers. One day, while hanging out with Chris after a shower, I was jonesing for a cigarette— badly. Chris was feeling the same. “You know who definitely has cigarettes?” He asked rhetorically while laying on the floor of the dorm room he shared with the son of a Mexican horse breeder. “Tom. We should go up to his room and steal his cigarettes! I think I saw where he hides his pack last time I was in his room.” Tom was a goofball. A rich, midwestern, dimwit that everyone took advantage of. My addiction got the better of me, I agreed. We devised a plan where I lured Tom out of his room while Chris snuck in and stole the cigarettes. The plan succeeded. Back in Chris’ room we lit up one cigarette apiece and smoked them away in silence. After we finished, Chris spoke up again, more seriously than I had ever heard him speak before, “I think we should give Tom his cigarettes back. I saw small round burn marks on his arms the other day. I think he needs these a lot more than we do.” A wave of relief washed over my body, I’d noticed the burn marks too. Once again, I lured Tom out of his room and once again Chris snuck in, only this time it was to return what we had stolen. I was glad that Chris had the courage to speak up in that moment when I didn’t. The courage to call out the error of our ways and seek to rectify it. He was right. Tom needed those cigarettes infinitely more than we did. Chris understood pain much better than me. That first trimester of junior year at Cypress was pure anarchy. Walking on our campus was like walking through a reanimated cemetery on Halloween night while the braindead zombies of grotesquely privileged teenagers traversed the manufactured paths and greeneries. It all started the year before; a year that was marked by a litany of offenses ranging from burglary to child pornography to non-lethal overdose. The following summer, a task force was assembled to attempt to figure out how to curb the destructive urges of a student body that was as wealthy, savvy, and well connected as any group of teenagers in the world. The task force decided that if the students had less free time, there would be less time for them to get into trouble. Weekend leave requests would now run through encrypted online servers so that signatures could not be forged, the usual mandatory weekday study hall now extended to Friday nights as well, and a half day of Saturday school was implemented. To a student body that had grown accustomed to a four-and-half day school week, the new schedule was sacrilege. Their plan failed miserably. It took us a few weeks to adjust, but by the end of September descent into debauchery had begun. Students were auctioning off their prescription medications to the highest bidder, freshmen girls were devising secret routes to continue sneaking into the rooms of seniors and post graduates, and parents were smuggling their children contraband during clandestine meetings at local restaurants. On top of that, due to the swift and drastic changes in school policies, enrollment applications dropped by almost seventy five percent, threatening the size of the student body, and the schools ability to operate. In disgrace, our headmaster was forced to resign, effective at the end of the trimester, and the new policies would be reversed going forward. The students had won, and we planned to celebrate that win at our winter celebration, the headmaster’s last formal event. In the week leading up to the winter celebration it was understood that all the cool kids would be taking Xanax shortly before the start of the event. The winter celebration happened on the last Friday night before winter finals week every year, and it was known as the formal close of the first trimester. All students and faculty were required to dress in their most formal attire, sit in the chapel for speeches and formal performances by the school band, and then shuffle in the cold to the dining hall for a formal dinner with a randomized seating chart so that everyone could be uncomfortable and eat bad food with people they would never normally speak to. It was a fucking snooze fest. I was on Xanax heavily at the time, back then everyone was. I was sleeping under my desk in class, nodding off with food still in my mouth at the dining hall, and stumbling around campus at night begging anybody who would talk to me for even half a pill. It felt like all the other students were doing similar things. At the winter celebration it was amplified to near comic proportions. I don’t remember much from the event, proof that the Xanax was working, but I do remember Lilith Foust getting expelled for dancing intoxicatedly on top of a table at the dinner. I’m sure that the rest of the ceremony’s events were just as amusing. I don’t have a solid memory of the events that transpired that night after the celebration had concluded either, but those events have been recanted to me so many times that I should be able to piece the story together somewhat reliably: I fumbled my way into the dorm blacked on out Xanax about thirty minutes before lights out while all the other boys were peeling off their jackets and ties. I saw Chris, and he told me that he had a blunt he’d be willing to share with me as long as we smoked it in my room because his roommate would not allow it in theirs. I had a single. Smoking weed indoors at boarding school is certain death unless adhering to the proper precautions, but in my inebriated state I’d forgotten to secure the necessary safeguards. I had opened the window, but there was no fan running to thin out the smoke, no towel under the door to stop the smoke from spreading, and no scented spray on hand to mitigate the odor. We finished the blunt quickly, but my room stunk of weed nonetheless, as did the entirety of the third floor hallway that housed both my room and his. Lights out had not yet happened, which meant that the dorm mother, the teacher that lived in an apartment in the dorm and was responsible for our general well being, would still be coming around room to room for her nightly check. Chris retreated to his room while I, with the last active braincell in my head, decided to take a shower to at least get the stench of marijuana off my body. I returned from the shower nearly asleep before I even dried off. I climbed onto my sheetless bed in just a towel, the combination of Xanax and weed ravishing my still-developing body, making it impossible to keep my eyes open. As I nodded off, a few of my senior friends, the elder statesmen of the dorm, banded together and, out of the goodness of their hearts, decided to save my ass. One of them sprayed my room down with cologne until it no longer reeked. One of them sprayed down the hallway to obfuscate the source of the stench. One of them lied to the dorm mother when she asked him if he smelled what she was smelling. I am grateful to this day that I had people that cared enough about me to look out for me. Chris was not so lucky. He hadn’t showered, and the dorm mother traced the smell back to his room. He was given the standard punishment: a five day out of school suspension, seen as a vacation to him, but not to his parents. I still remember the guilt I felt when I found out Chris got in trouble. It seemed so unfair. Sure, I had more self awareness and a better support system but still, we were doing the exact same things at the exact same time. It wasn’t fair that he was gone but I’m still here. As soon as I finished the article I knew I wanted to attend Chris’ funeral. I did some digging and found out that there would be a service and reception the following Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Today was Thursday, my last day of classes before break. I would take the bus from my upstate New York campus into Boston, spend the night a friend’s apartment, go home sometime on Saturday, then return to Boston on Wednesday for the funeral. Boston is only about thirty minutes from my family’s home. For now though, I was still in my college apartment, and I was going out that night. I took a shower before I left, and thought back to the showers I’d shared with Chris. I began to sob in the shower, and continued to sob while I washed up and returned to my bedroom. I found a notebook, sat naked on my bedroom floor, and sobbed while I wrote a poem about Chris. It was raw and emotional and terrible. I haven’t looked at it since. I wiped my tears, finished getting dressed, and left for my night out. I arrived at my then best friend, now wife’s, apartment, and her roommate greeted me with the playful rudeness that defined our relationship. “Why are your eyes so red?” She asked, expecting me to retort with a quip about the copious amount of weed I smoked prior to my arrival. “I was just crying,” I snapped back impatiently with all the honesty and energy I could muster. My best friend, already abreast of the situation at hand, shoved a drink in my hand in an attempt to lighten the mood. I remained quiet, pensive, introverted— not totally uncommon for a night out with her friends. The next morning I was back at my apartment with my girlfriend, and she was helping me pack so that I would not miss my bus. Right before I was about to leave she stood between me and the bedroom door, asking me to have sex with her one last time before we left for break. She threw her petite body against the door, pulled her panties to the side, and begged me to take her from behind. Wearily I agreed, despite my lack of interest, like a dutiful boyfriend should. I tried my hardest, but it was not hard enough. I could feel the insecurity in the air as I tucked myself back into my pants. “You’re just sad about your friend, right baby?” “Yeah, I’m just really stressed right now,” I said, but that was half a lie. Truthfully I hated her, but I did not realize I hated her for another three months or so. I didn’t hangout with Chris very much for the rest of junior year after he got back from his suspension. I’m not sure why. I hung out with my friends, he hung out by himself and went home on the weekends. I had an uneventful summer, working four days a week as an urban farmer and still hopelessly clinging to my dream of playing college basketball. I arrived back on the Cypress Academy campus as a senior, and one of the lucky students chosen to be housed in one of the two new dormitories on campus. They were for upperclassmen only, with fifty single rooms each, one for boys and one for girls. Chris was in the new dorm too, I was on the third floor, he was on the first. With the money I saved from urban farming I invested in my first electronic weed pen so that I could get high discreetly on demand. Once word got out that I was getting my own weed I started seeing a lot more of Chris. My older friends had graduated by then and I preferred being alone at that time. However, I welcomed Chris whenever he knocked on my door. He would sit in my beanbag chair while I lay in the bed and we would talk, laugh, and tell stories while he waited for me to inevitably pass him the weed or a cigarette. I could tell that he was using me to achieve his daily fixes, but I didn’t mind. By Chris, being used was a pleasure. I appreciated the company, and I thought Chris’ stories were very entertaining. Plus, it was my way of assuaging the previous year’s guilt. He visited my room whenever he needed to; early in the morning before I had showered, during the day on breaks from his classes, late at night while I was dressed in only underwear, and I would let him. He tried to repay me anyway he could. He offered companionship, would do favors for me when I asked, and shared his contraband whenever he had any to share. Never Xanax though, those were always all for him. I quit playing basketball early on during senior year to have more time for doing drugs, and eventually my room became a hangout not just for Chris, but for a full group of wayward boys who all needed some kind of substantive fix. There was Hank Kramer, born in Guatemala and adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts parents; Evan Cash, a new money douchebag whose last name was the happiest coincidence in the world in his own opinion; Jake Bradly, a virgin in the grade below us; Nate Briggs, a recruited lacrosse player with a foot fetish; and Ernie Urlacher, from Alaska. They were not my best friends, but they were a like-minded and fun cohort; I enjoyed their company greatly. We laughed, we danced, we debated, we fought; we acted like schoolboys on the precipice of becoming men. It was those kinds of random connections that made boarding school bearable. To us it was not novel, or prestigious, or extravagant— it was just high school, and high school sucks. We all had English class together, we usually got high beforehand. It was taught by a first year teacher, Ms. Hathaway, and the only students in the class were my ragtag crew of raucous stoners, a few other misfit boys that stood firmly on the periphery of our group, and two girls who could spit and swear worse than any of the boys when properly inspired— one from Maine, one from Indonesia. With eyes glazed over we spent the year tormenting our rookie teacher endlessly, making sure that, come summertime, she had earned her place in the program. Lessons were disrupted, assignments were bullshitted, and mandatory reading was rarely ever completed. We made a glorious mockery of the elite education out parents paid exorbitantly to expose us to. There was a presentation due on the last day of school; Chris was scheduled to present last. He stood in front of the class and presented exactly one slide before returning to his seat. “That’s it?” I called out in a bit of jestful heckling. “It’s my last day of high school ever,” he answered, dead pan, before sitting back down in his chair. He was right. High school was over, the real world was on the horizon, and he could not have cared less. After the bus ride from Ithaca to Boston I texted my parents from my friend’s apartment to let them know I would be attending a funeral over this break, attempting to avoid any awkward conversations happening in person. My attempt failed. At brunch with my mother the day before the funeral she told me she read the news in an email blast sent out by Cypress Academy. We spoke on Chris for a while. She said that she could not imagine the turmoil I must presently be going through. She said it was odd that we would all continue living while he was doomed to exist as a twenty year-old eternally. I agreed. Then she mentioned the fact that my younger brother was also named Chris. I’d forgotten until right then. Their legal names were different, but Chris is a nickname they shared. The connection is faint, but it is there. I pondered this connection in search of meaning for years after my mother’s comment, but ultimately decided there is none. Sometimes the strings that bind us humans together are so whisper thin that they bear no meaning at all. I had a brief conversation with my dad on the morning of the funeral. Back then all of our conversations were brief. I wore a white shirt, navy jacket, blue tie, khaki pants, and navy boat shoes. “We have to get you a nice suit. It’s time you got a nice full suit,” he said as he sat on the edge of his bed in a wife-beater and boxer-briefs. I agreed. “I read that article about your friend. Does that sound like something he would have gotten himself into?” I answered truthfully. “Well then,” he said, letting his voice trail off in order to convey a message that I understood: we are all solely responsible for our own actions. Probably a relic from his stint in rehab. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been. Our conversation was over after that. Evan Cash picked me up for the funeral. Jake Bradly was with him, he’d flown in from North Carolina the night before to stay at Evan’s New Hampshire home for the funeral, then fly home for Thanksgiving after the service. I climbed into the burgundy leather seats of Cash’s all black Mercedes Benz, and was greeted by the boys, now young men, I hadn’t seen since graduation. Cash tossed a bag of weed at me and asked me to roll it into joints. I didn’t know what the joints were for, but I had no qualms about the task I’d been assigned. I’d spent the majority of the previous summer living out of a drug den in Boston, I was the designated joint roller. I have a gift for rolling picturesque joints; a gift I would share with fiends, drug dealers, local rappers, and any other stone that rolled through the abandoned property, in exchange for free drugs and alcohol. It was a great deal for a spoiled teenager that wanted for nothing besides a cheap high. The funeral was held at one of the chapels on the campus of Boston College, we were early. The football team was practicing nearby, we heard their testosterone fueled roars as we exited the vehicle. Evan and Jake led the way while I followed behind, taking in the scenery. It was late November in New England: the sky was a gloomy hue of navy-grey, the trees were bare, save for a few burnt orange leaves that refused to die, the air was brittle yet sharp. As we approached the chapel I began to make out the sullen faces of fellow funeral goers. Evan and Jake navigated around the crowd and through a thin forest until we emerged on the other side, in front of a small pond. I was confused until Evan pulled out one of the joints I’d rolled in the car. I objected, referencing a piece of advice given to me by Chris himself. It was the morning of graduation and we were in the hallway of one of the school buildings preparing for the procession. I was nursing a wicked hangover, but had still mustered up the strength to smoke a little weed. I asked Chris if he’d done the same. “No,” he answered, to my surprise. “There are some times in life where you wanna be present.” Those words echoed in my heart as I tried, completely against my nature, to pressure my friends against smoking weed. I recited the words, arguing that if there was ever a time where Chris would have thought it best to be present and sober, surely it would be at his own funeral. They argued back, claiming that we were honoring his memory by partaking in one of his favorite pastimes in preparation for his send off. So there we were: three stooges trying to interpret the opinions of a dead man with a pond in front of us, a football team to our right, weed still burning, and a funeral threatening to start at any moment. Eventually, they talked me into it. I still don’t know why I abandoned my principles so easily. I gave in despite never feeling good about what we were doing. I told myself that it was okay because it was the first, and only, reunion of our English class gang that we would ever have with Chris above ground, but I knew in my soul that smoking right then was wrong. Evan sparked the joint but the wind whipped ferociously, another classic characteristic of late fall in New England, causing the joint to smoke unevenly and poorly. Maybe it was Chris stepping in, confirming his wishes, and once again giving me support when I lacked courage. Maybe it was just the fucking wind. All I know is I didn’t get high. When we returned from the forest the crowd outside the chapel had grown significantly. It was mostly older people whom I suspected to be family members. I didn’t notice a lot of younger people who may have been Chris’ public school friends. After a minute, on the edge of the crowd, I spotted some familiar faces. It was a few of the boys from the outskirts of our English class, along with Allie Ostertag. Allie had been Nate Brigg’s girlfriend throughout high school, and Nate and Chris were best friends, so the three of them had been somewhat of a trio back then. Her and Nate had since broken up, but I thought it a nice gesture of her to fly in from Berlin anyway. Evan, Jake, Allie, and the few other boys from English class were the only people I recognized at Chris’ funeral. In the aftermath, my mother considered it disgraceful that Cypress Academy didn’t send a representative to mourn the tragic loss of a recent graduate, but I assured her that he would not have wanted any representative there to mourn on the academy’s behalf. The best part of Catholicism is the aesthetic. Grandiose gothic architecture, colorful stained glass windows, artwork that reflects obsessively solemn and dutiful devotion. A vibrant stained glass window pane captured my attention as the crowd was shuffled into the chapel. I took my seat in a pew in one of the middle rows. Once everyone had settled in, the casket, closed, was walked down the aisle and placed in front of the alter for all to see. The funeral started with a hymn. Then some word from the parish priest. He told the one about how God sometimes calls troubled people home early because their souls are too pure for our world. Then the two eulogies: one from each of his older sisters. I listened intently to the stories of their chubby blond brother running around the house as a young rascal, but with every pause in their speech I would be distracted by the weeping coming diagonally across the aisle. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked over to the source of the weeping. It was Chris’ grandmother, weeping at the sight of her grandson’s closed casket. I did not look over again. In that box was a friend of mine, with nine stab wounds, who would never walk the earth again. He would never again be rejected by a girl; or cut a song off after thirty seconds, even if he liked it, due to lack of attention span; or dance like an idiot while his pants sagged halfway off his ass. Chris’ story was over while the stories of his friends and family members were forced to continue without one of their most integral characters. Everyone stood up as the casket was marched back down the aisle and out the door. The family followed first, the rest of the attendees, myself included, followed behind shortly after. The funeral was over. The family ducked away into an envoy of vehicles, lead by the hearse, on their way to the private burial. My former Cypress classmates and I lingered outside the chapel for a moment, enjoying cigarettes. There was a reception at an Italian restaurant in the North End, most of the guests would be attending. The few stray boys from English class had decided against going to the reception, so Jake, Allie, Evan, and I piled into Evan’s car and drove to the restaurant. We smoked one of the joints I rolled on the way. I puffed with a clear conscience, my respectful abstinence was over. With red eyes, we entered the reception. There were hors d’oeuvres. Some people from the funeral that I didn’t know tried to make small talk with me in line for the buffet. People never consider the different kinds of folks from different areas of their life that will be forced to mingle at their funeral. I exited each conversation at the first given opportunity. I took a seat at a square table with my boarding school chums. We gossiped about all the things that extremely economically advantaged teenagers gossip about: who wintered in Zurich, who recently received botched plastic surgery, who was in rehab. Allie shared with us that, during his friendship with Chris and the tail end of their relationship, Nate had become addicted to Xanax too. He was being treated at a rehab facility in California. That’s why he was unable to attend the funeral. It was the kind of rehab facility that cuts off all contact with the outside world, so she didn’t even know if Nate knew Chris was dead. Nate still calls me from time to time asking for Xanax, all these years later. Chris’ other best friend, Hank, also lacking direction, had joined the military. He was stationed in Iraq. Chris had been laid to rest with neither of his best friends able to say goodbye. Near the exit, Chris’ family had set up large poster boards decorated with photos of him throughout his life. The pictures started from birth, and contained images from parts of Chris’ life that I didn’t even know existed. For some reason, I used my cellphone camera to take a picture of the board that displayed Chris in middle childhood; before disappointment, before drugs, before life stuffed him into an early grave. I wanted to remember him that way. A way in which I had never known him. We left the funeral reception in search of real food. There was a sushi restaurant downtown that I’d been wanting to try. We smoked another joint on the way. We arrived at the restaurant, sat down at a table, and ordered the most expensive thing on menu: the sushi boat to share, plus individual options for each of us. The boat came out quickly. We talked again as we ate, aloofly ignoring the horrific circumstances that brought us all together. It was as if we were just four old friends having a casual reunion. That’s when I noticed the privileged carelessness that we all traipsed through the world with. We float through life free of any real challenge or consequence; using money, privilege, and status as justification for why we should be allowed to galavant chaotically across the globe without giving a damn about what we damage. We break things and wait for other people to fix them so often that we forget some things cannot be put back together and made whole again. We do whatever we want, all the time, without caring who it hurts, even if the victim is ourselves. It’s a despicable way of living, but it’s the only life I’ve ever known, and the only one I’ll ever have to. We stuffed our gluttonous faces until we were near illness, split the bill across four of our parents credit cards, and left to continue our lives. I claimed the leftover sushi. |
BLAKE EDWARDS is a Black writer from Lawrence, Massachusetts. He focuses on literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting. Themes central in his work are death, sex, addiction, violence, masculinity, mental health, family, and dark romance. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
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