The Star Spangled Banner
by Lauren Chaves
Artist: Melissa Jeralds
PART II
“Max McKee your results are in, and the doctor will see you. Just go down the hallway, and his office is to the left.”
Max’s head hung low as he shuffled through the fluorescently lit hallway and entered his doctor’s office. Max sat down in a cracked brown leather chair. He stared at his doctor in the face, “All right doc, what is it? Am I clean?”
“Yes, you’re clean, Max, but do I need to remind you that you must use a condom, first of all you can’t even live with the guilt past a week, and you’re an anxious mess.”
“Well, why the hell did you call me down here? Why didn’t...you just like tell me a better way I thought for sure I had something.”
“To talk to you about your mental health, you have some qualities associated with anxiety.”
“Duh, after having seen my brother contract HIV by some rich Bosnian, who writes him a 30,000 dollar check a month in exchange for shortening and ruining the quality of his life. Why wouldn’t I come in here every time I forget to wear a condom? Let’s not get caught up in that story, but are you going to prescribe me something?”
“10 milligrams of Xanex as needed 60 of ‘em. Please take them wisely.”
“Thanks Doc.”
His parents were waiting in the car outside in the parking lot. His things for school were packed in the back. He had his parents drive him two hours from Massachusetts to Vermont where he said his goodbyes to them.
“Au’ve Maxine, I will miss you, be good,” as his mother gave him kisses.
His father gave him a handshake, “Goodbye.”
Now all he had to worry about was how to pick Natasha up from the airport without a car. She didn’t have the money to take a taxicab. He would worry about tacking up his Kurt Cobain poster on his dorm walls later.
***
Natasha waited for her parents to park the car. Her dad worked at the airport, so he was allowed to go to the gate with her. He worked with TSA, so not only did she hate him, but the rest of America did too.
“You sure you have everything sweetie,” her mom pleaded.
“Yup!”
“Natasha, I really do wish you didn’t dress so manly. You look homeless.”
“Thanks Mother.” A swarm of giddy tourist threatened to pull apart their small family.
“Kay Natasha, let’s get this thing over. No liquids in your carry on? That would be mighty embarrassing in front of my superiors. His own daughter not knowing any better!”
“Of course, everything is to code, el Diablo,” she whispered the last part. Little did he know, Natasha had what were called yellow school buses (2 milligram of Xanex bars) smuggled in her bra?
They went to the ticket counter, and as Natasha showed her ID so did her dad, then her mother, “She’s mentally challenged as you can tell. She needs my assistance to the gate along with her father’s help.” Her mother had trouble letting go, and every time it was a new excuse.
Natasha gave her best impersonation, “Mommy, me love you big times”. Her parents thought that she was still sixteen-years-old, but at least, they were naïve.
At the gate, her mother silently wept, “I love you, call anytime, good luck at school, and study hard.”
Her dad turned to her and gave her a quick hug, “Stay out of trouble.”
She looked back as she started down the tunnel towards the plane. She felt such an emotional pull towards her mother as their eyes locked. She turned her head, and her hair was in her way. She couldn’t make out the shape of her father, but he had always been a blurry character in her life anyway. She was off for Vermont…for college…for the comfort of Max.
***
On the plane, she popped the Xanex, and put in her headphones. Nirvana played as the stewardess went over safety precautions. As the plane departed from the gate, she received a text from Randy, “Bitch, you still owe me for that DOC.”
Natasha rolled her eyes and thought how greedy drug dealers are, which Randy proved to be very greedy in Arizona. After Randy had dialed the tow company in the cab, Natasha grabbed the phone from her, “Where the fuck do you get off taking our car? The deal is that I will come over and fuck you for 250 dollars. Now the extra 150 dollars is because I’m pissed you towed my car.”
“All right, we’re based in Phoenix.”
“So you’re telling me I have to pay a cab to drive me that 45 minutes out of away from Tempe. That’s going to be 275 dollars for a fuck now. What’s the address?”
“689 Desert Rd, Phoenix, Arizona”
“We will be there in a little bit.”
“Okay, taxi driver, we need to go to 689 Desert Rd, Phoenix, Arizona, and there’s a tip if you say nothing of what is happening and wait for us to finish.”
“Gotcha girlie.”
“Natasha are you serious? I am not participating!”
“No coward, you are standing guard.”
Natasha stopped walking when she saw a balding fat man at the front gate of the tow yard. This must be the john, the creeper, who has come to reap my pussy for the car. The tow man’s face filled with a toothy grin. Oh! He had been so lucky and led Natasha to his RV. Inside was a mattress without sheets. He unbuckled his belt and licked his lips at the same time. He revealed the smallest penis that hid under folds of fat. Natasha couldn’t believe that such an infantile penis existed on a grown man. His belly fat made more noise than the insertion of his penis into her pussy. The RV rocked for less than 5 minutes, and he tossed the used condom next to her boots and red skirt.
Outside the RV, she tossed fifty bucks on the desert floor. Randy sat on the RV’s steps. “What’s this for?”
“For standing guard, and we are good on any drugs you gave me.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. We did smoke some DMT.”
“Who’s the one that had the ball’s to get us out of this entire predicament? Me, not you! So shut up, asking for anything else would be ignorant and greedy. We are leaving so follow me coward.”
The taxi cab driver was leaning coolly on the hood of the cab, “So that didn’t take too long girls?”
“Nope just get us back to this bitch’s friend’s apartment. Don’t say a word to any police.”
***
The plane jostled her out of the Arizona desert, just as the RV had rocked back and forth. “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking; it will take exactly six hours to get to Burlington, Vermont so just sit back and relax.”
“Would you like a beverage sweetheart? We heard you are a very special passenger,” the flight attendant asked as if this was her first contact with a mentally handicapped person ever. Natasha thought that she must especially thank her mother for this extra-special lie she cooked up because now she was being treated like that guy in “I AM SAM”.
“Ahhhhh RUFFF RUFFFRUFFF, pet me please. Me a puppy. I want whiskey.”
“I’m sorry, we can’t serve you whiskey,” she smiled embarrassed.
“Orange juice, no whiskey please. Stops trying to get me drunk, bad person, bad person.”
“You asked for whiskey.”
“I want treat.”
“You tell your parents that they should have never let you fly alone, considering that you are mentally handicapped. This is just completely irresponsible, and I don’t get paid enough to deal with this.” Needless to say, Natasha didn’t receive her orange juice, but she was in a Xanex coma filled with Jimmy Hendrix and Led Zeppelin riffs, poetry for the head.
At the luggage claim, she grabbed her viola, and two duffle bags. She dropped it all suddenly when she saw Max standing next to a ski mountain advertisement and ran. Max deserved theatrics and so did everyone else in the depressing fluorescent airport. An embrace that lasted minutes, hours, centuries, eons, shit it could have moved the continents back into Pangaea. “Tasha, I missed you so much! Let’s not do this away thing again. It was miserable.”
“You can say that again, but let’s not dwell on it. Let’s get fucked up. Ohhand something funny, my mom tried to pass me off as mentally handicapped, so she could see me off at the gate.”
“I love your mother.”
“She is one of the most overlooked characters in the history of the world, and I wish she was everyone’s mother. As for our fathers, there resides a contemporary ring of hell in Dante’s Inferno for them.”
“How was Arizona?”
“Sore subject something best left buried in the desert.”
They packed her duffels in the car. Slipped into the leather seats of an Audi, they simultaneously lit cigarettes.
The Vermont air was cold, it was nine o’clock at night, and the dew already was drifting down from the heavy air.
“Hey, Max whose car is this?”
“Oh, I borrowed it from some freshmen. I told them we would buy them beer.”
“My god, those fucks can never be self sufficient, can they?”
“Nope, but I told them a thirty rack of beer was twenty-five dollars, and they coughed it up.”
“It’s nice to pretend that we have an Audi for a little bit anyway, when we both can’t even afford one quarter inch of the door handle.”
“Rich Kids!”
“Let’s stop at the beverage warehouse and buy them the cheapest beer; meanwhile, let’s scour this golden chariot for change.”
Max and Natasha combed the leather seats and floors. “Man, rich people must think change ain’t worth shit, but we just found six dollars in change. Let’s get a cheap bottle of wine and bottle of whiskey with this change and the change leftover from their cheap thirty rack.”
They left the beverage store with their hands full, waddling beneath the weight, and smiling the whole time.
***
Max gave the privileged freshmen their natural ice and walked to Natasha’s new dorm where she sat on a bare bed with just her speakers plugged in, sucking on a cig and drinking the wine from the bottle. He met Mike on the way. Mike walked briskly as toward some crystal picture future while chattering, “So, the older man didn’t really work out. He never gave me as many blow jobs as I deserved. It always seemed like his pleasure came first. He was a mistake, but no one here can know.”
“I get it Mike. It’s a fucking Catholic College. There’s no latitude for strange behavior, not defined in the bible, so let’s go to Natasha’s.”
“Yes please.”
A knock at the door sent Natasha tip-toeing to her closet to surprise her company as she said, “Please do come in and make yourself at home, pee in the corner, ash on the floor, and puke in the garbage.” As they came in the room, she busted out of the closet and said, “I’m finally out of the closet, guess who I am?”
“The nefarious Deans at this college.”
“Mathew Broderick, he is totally flaming gay, but wanted babies and the follies of the American dream. Cheers!”
Following Mike and Max, their friend Alex walked in. With shaggy blonde hair, he could be mistaken for a sixteen-year-old, but at twenty-two, he was a narcoleptic, which always made drinking with him interesting.
Childhood was rekindled that night, as much as it could be rekindled. If you had asked each one of them that night the colors they had seen, they would have said red, blue and yellow. Max, Mike, Alex and Natasha chased each other out one of the many college fields. Running away from every dark shadow to meet a friendly face and dart away from it. They sat in the dewy grass, panting and passing the whiskey and a joint. Since neither of them had TV’s, they watched the fireflies dance around the marshes. Natasha held Max’s hand, and then she reached for Mike’s hand and clasped it tightly. Alex was curled into a fetal position, cuddling his beer and snoring.
After the night’s frivolities, Natasha sat up in her bed that night and woke up Max; her phone said it was 4:00 in the morning. They slept together most nights, which confused many, but it was an asexual relationship.
“Max wake up, Max! Max!”
“What Natasha? I was just getting to sleep. I’m exhausted.”
“Don’t you want your computer back?”
“I don’t really care right now; I’m tired.”
“Exactly the point, it’s the perfect time for a break in.”
“Well, I will fall asleep in the midst of break in at this point.”
“I have some adrenaline.”
“What the hell Natasha?”
“Yeah, my mom thinks everything bad can happen to me, so she gave me like two Epi Pens. That’s pure adrenaline. I stab you and you stab me, and we get to steal your laptop back from rich prick Dan Sheldon.”
“Like blood brothers, wicked.”
Natasha groped around in her suitcase, throwing clothes everywhere to find the Epi pens as Max put on Nirvana. She read the directions on the box, “Each EpiPen Auto-Injector contains a single dose of a medicine called epinephrine, which you inject into your outer thigh. DO NOT INJECT INTRAVENOUSLY. DO NOT INJECT INTO YOUR BUTTOCK, as this may not be effective for a severe allergic reaction. In case of accidental injection, please seek immediate medical treatment.” Then she read the risks, “Side effects may include an increase in heart rate, a stronger or irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea and vomiting, difficulty breathing, paleness, dizziness, weakness or shakiness, headache, apprehension, nervousness, or anxiety. These side effects usually go away quickly, especially if you rest. If you have high blood pressure or an overactive thyroid, these side effects may be more severe or longer lasting. If you have heart disease, you could experience chest pain (angina). If you have diabetes, your blood sugar levels may increase after use. If you have Parkinson's disease, your symptoms may temporarily get worse.”
“Okay Max everything checks out. I just stab you in the thigh.”
“Alright, do it Tasha. I’m excited, not many can say they have done this.” She poised the pen over his thigh and slammed it in and a popping noise followed, as the medicine was ejected into his body. She withdrew the pen from his thigh, and an inch long needle followed.
Shit this is some serious medical stuff, thought Natasha, Oh well I’m knee deep into now. “Man, I can like feel it already. My heart’s pounding. I’m not sleeping tonight. Look, a bruise is already forming. You fucking really stabbed me hard.”
“Well, now it’s my turn. I never thought I’d say this, but will you please stab me Max?”
Natasha lit a cigarette in order to forget her throbbing thigh. They had a mission to get back stolen property while Dan Sheldon, whose Uncle happened to be on the Board of Trustees for the school, was passed out drunk. Fucking asshole even sold the shittiest coke and weed, was caught plagiarizing twice, and has accumulated three DUI’s, but somehow has never been kicked out of college.
Well, we know where you sleep Dan Sheldon, Natasha thought.
It just so happened he lived in one of the plushest campus houses, go figure.
***
Natasha and Max walked solemnly over to Dan’s house, passing a cig between them. There was no plan. They would figure it out when they got there. They peaked through Dan’s window and saw that the kid had a nice new Mac desktop computer.
What could the Neanderthal really do with it besides watch porn on a bigger screen, thought Natasha.
He had what looked like a freshmen girl cuddled next to him.
“Max, what do we do? He has a desktop. It’s not like we can fucking take that monster of a computer, and I can’t see your laptop.”
“Get on my shoulders, Natasha.”
“Kay,” with a grunt she was on his shoulders and peering in, boxers on the floor, duffle bag, and Max’s laptop with lines cut out on it.
“I spotted it, and guess what? He has his shitty coke cut out in lines all over it. Let me down. There’s no use in using the window since his bed is shoved up right next to it.”
“I don’t feel like getting on his level and being a thief.”
“Exactly what I was feeling once we got here; we are going to just simply knock until the fucker wakes up, bum rush him, and take the laptop.”