Last Night I Sang to the Monster Read Free

that beautiful song. Why would I want to hear a trumpet whispering beautiful lies into my ears? And why the fuck was the guy wasting his time on a kid like me?
    So I walked around and drank and smoked. And cried and yelled at Mr. Garcia. I hate you. I hate you. I thought the liquor was supposed to help. And it sort of did help. It made everything feel farther away. The farther away things felt, the better.
    Mr. Garcia—he’s one of the pieces of paper on my floor. So was the bourbon I liked to drink.
    Pieces of paper.
    Yeah, see, maybe this place that’s supposed to heal me will just hand me a good broom. So I can sweep up the floor that’s in my brain. Maybe I’ll tell Adam that I don’t need to remember. I just need a really good broom.

REMEMBERING
    Somebody put a calendar on the bulletin board in my room. I guess they wanted to make sure I knew what day it was. I think I heard a voice say, “You can mark the days.” That’s a funny thing to do with days. Mark them. Put an X on them. Cross them out.
    I arrived here on New Year’s Day, 2008. There was a big storm on the night of January 2 nd . All that noise woke me up. I lay there and listened to the wind and I swear it was trying to tear down the cabin.
    The wind was like the world. It was this thief that came along and tried to take whatever I had that was left.
    I have this storm inside me. It’s trying to kill me. I wonder sometimes if that’s such a bad thing.
    I know about storms.
    I’m tired.
    I just want to sleep forever.
    Maybe I should tell the storm to go ahead and kill me.

PERFECT
-1-
    I always felt guilty about my plan. The plan about getting perfect grades and going to college. I can be seriously mean and selfish. My mom and dad, they loved me. It’s not like they would hug me or touch me or things like that. Not that I like to be touched. This family thing, it’s complicated. Everyone’s got stuff. My mom and dad were trying to deal. My brother was trying to deal. I was trying to deal. Running out on them—maybe that’s not dealing. Maybe that’s just running.
    My mom and dad were doing the best they could. I could see that. Things were not easy for them. I knew my mom was seriously depressed and my dad’s only hobby was drinking. And the thing of it was that I had school and they didn’t. What did they have?
    High school was like going to work. I got paid with A’s. I was really into the studying and the A thing. This one time I thought I was going to explode over a B- I got on a pop quiz in history class. I mean there were firecrackers going off in my stomach and in my head. I was wigging. I went home and started swigging down bourbon. It always felt good, to take a drink, the way that the liquor burned in my throat and sort of exploded in my stomach. Liquor really tore me up. In a good way.
    I went a little mental that night. Well, maybe I went a lot mental. Seriously. I took my baseball bat and went walking around and broke a few windshields. Okay, that doesn’t sound cool, but that’s what I did. I went totally mental. I admit it.
    I ran into some problems and had to run a lot because lots of thosecars had alarms. But I really got off on beating the shit out of some of those fancy BMWs. Maybe I was just pissed off because I didn’t have a car. My brother, Santiago, he dropped out of high school and he didn’t have a job but he got a car. I never understood whatever passed between my parents and my brother. Just never got it. Families don’t make sense. You can’t explain them because families, well, they aren’t intellectual. And they aren’t emotional either—at least not mine. We didn’t do the emotion thing very well in my family.
    See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads—just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there.
    So yeah, my brother—the raging ingrate—he gets the car. I make straight