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New Hampshire. New Hampshire and my family flat-out rejected them both. Of course, their being addicted to and eventually withdrawing from heroin didn’t make explaining who they were easy. At my nephew’s house, after I showed them his alcoholic ferret, Pepper through a brick through the back window of my car, which I had already broken and replaced with a plexiglass likeness. This was from a third story balcony. Damien was exceptionally livid and threw my friends out. I left with them.

I would leave air fresheners in the woods or on the train tracks. I would leave them in the bathrooms of friends who would wonder where the fuck did this come from and how do I get refills for it? I did everything in my power to destroy the facade that was attempting to hide the truth from all of us, that the life we had been born into was a lie, had been a lie for seven or more generations, that the separation we felt from ourselves was unnatural, that the slipping into other dimensions I experienced when I went catatonic and stared up into the sky, drunk and laying in the sun on a railroad trestle, that those were not distortions of reality, but reality itself asserting itself.

The summer that Pepper’s parent’s house burned down he got a dog. Brick was a miniature Boston Terrier. Pepper was dating a young woman who would bear his first child. That child, who I met as an infant, must be 18 now. Pepper would not be allowed to be in their lives for long. But, on one particular day before he