From the memoirs of a teenage degenerate:
CHAPTER 2: BATHROOM GRAFFITI BEAU
Soundtrack: “London Dungeon” by the Misfits
If you’re the wrong kind of guy, the best kind of marketing to attract the bad kind of girl is having your name scrawled in bathroom graffiti.
When I was 16, Tana, Dar and I went to the dark place. Our parents considered us alcoholics, so we figured: might as well get shit-canned on a Tuesday. In lieu of talking about the trauma that Adam Acid bestowed upon our girl gang, we drank together. Bleak pow-wows in Tana’s car with nothing but us three, plain shots of vodka and the eerie vapor of our breath. I’ve spent half a lifetime searching for that level of commiseration our little addict’s circle shared. It was our warm, bland vignette against the sharp world. Hiding vodka everywhere, the plastic bottles multiplying kaleidoscopically. I was convinced we would never lead normal lives, glassy eyed at the beginning of the school day, taking shots in the locker room, the sharp tang of vodka on our breath.
I remember, just once, dragging a kitchen knife across my skin, my reflection stark in the large double mirrors of my bathroom, in the shadows and silver light of night. It was the type of knife you chopped garlic with, definitely not sharp enough to do any damage. It just left white indents, like I was scratching a line into dry skin. I wasn’t serious. I just wanted an artistic expression for my pain. I was no stranger to anonymous mental health hotlines; I wanted to vent about my problems more than anyone could bear to listen. I was putting on a dramatic play of pain for the nobody that showed up.
It was within this sluzzy murk that I finally met my bathroom graffiti beau. The path leading up to this moment began years ago, at the goth coffee shop, Paris on the Poudre.
Erin K. Barnes 