Brendan Dude

Something was wrong.

Because David couldn’t drive for crap.

I heard it in the way he slurred his incoherent words, and I saw it in his bloodshot eyes.
“So, um…how was your play, dude?” he said.

“It wasn’t a play, man.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t a play.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sure you did good.”

A Jimmie’s Chicken Shack song came on. He banged his head, driving onto the sidewalk. “I love this song!”

He cruised 20 miles below the speed limit, and took up two lanes, constantly forgetting his turn signal, and sometimes even forgetting to actually turn. He reeked of a mixture of liquor and wet dog, so I wrinkled up my nose.

“Oh yeah, um. Joey. No, Brendan. Don’t - don’t – listen to whatever that kid Joey tells ya. I hate him sometimes. He’s an idiot. He don’t know anything.”

He took a long sip out of a Fepsi can that I’m sure contained something other than Fepsi. He burped loudly and laughed himself into a coughing fit.

“Dude…dude, awesome!”

I was really uncomfortable. You know, I was watching someone I’ve known for so long do something completely unexpected. I mean, I had a feeling David spent his days rarely sober. But this reached beyond my expectations. Whenever he was drunk or something, I avoided his ass like the plague.

I didn’t hate him, of course not. He pushed me around a lot when I was younger in a brotherly way, until he laid off gradually. He tried to do good for Mom and Dad, but in turn, he just screwed everything up. He was a sweet kid. He really was. He just wasn’t too bright.

So I guess he realized his flaws and then practically flunked out of school a while back, yet on the other hand, he wasn’t stupid. He could go to Harvard if he tried. But he didn’t. He was blind. And now, I thought I knew for sure what he was blinded by.

I never really knew David. I presumed this was what he did. I sure as hell didn’t like knowing for sure, though – this kid needed help.

And I really didn’t like realizing how similar we were.

I tried to please people before. I’m talkin’, like ages ago. The truth was, I only messed things up. Then I just said, “To hell with it,” and did my own thing. David? He was me, times a thousand. If he tried to help an old lady cross the street, she’d keel over and die as soon as he touched her.

Wait…wait a second…

Oh my God. Oh my God. Whoa.

Suddenly, as the song switched, I remembered a summer day when I was eleven years old.

The night before it happened, a giant sheet of rain had terrorized Claymore and left neighborhoods everywhere dripping wet and muddy. That was the weekend when Dad and the then thirteen-year-old David were replacing the fence in our backyard because the neighbors’ dog had dug through it.

The truck – the truck David now owned, actually, and the one we were driving in right then – got stuck in a mud pit when Dad tried to drive it back there to drop some wood off. He’d tried pushing it out with no luck, and there was really only one thing left to do.

A twelve-year-old Joey had tried to help Dad out, but Dad just shoved him away and told him he was only getting in the way. Joey sulked for a while, but then went away. Sort of.

Dad told David to try pushing the gas pedal of the truck while he pushed. David had never driven anything before, and after Dad ended up covered in mud from the truck spraying it all over him, he told David to give up.

Over the roar of the engine, David didn’t hear, though. He kept a foot firmly on the gas pedal, and the speedometer climbed up to around forty-five miles an hour, despite the truck staying stationary. He felt the truck slide out of the pit and knew that Dad was only crushing the chances of the truck escaping when he told him to stop, so he just kept going.

Joey saw the whole event as the truck finally was set free and David ended up speeding to nowhere; Joey ran over to tell Dad, since David had the engine going to loud for anyone to hear.

He should’ve watched where he was going, though, ‘cause he ended up right under the truck.

That fuckin’ hospital bill was a nightmare. Joey got a concussion and had to stay in the hospital for two weeks, missing out on school and family. To this day, Mom and Dad are still trying to pay all that crap off despite him being mostly fine.

I can still recall David holding me tightly the night we got home from the hospital, crying and saying things like, “I’m such a fuck-up,” and, “I don’t do anything right.”

You just don’t forget something like that.

He slept for a week. He went from a happy idiot to a sad idiot, skipping school and staying out for days at a time. Gradually, we saw him less and less, and once Joey got out of the hospital, Joey pissed all of us off more and more. I thought his attitude was linked to David, but I never found out for sure. And from time to time, they’d get in some pretty bad fights and Dad and me would have to interfere their stupid asses.

How old was I again? Right. I was barely ten. That was really young for me. I can hardly remember sixth grade. I gotta wonder what triggered that thought.

You know, I had to wonder if he really did hate David. Maybe he didn’t know that it was him that caused him to finally have enough grief and snap. It was Joey’s stupidity that made David not see him, and it was Joey who made him break, admitting that he messed up every single thing he tried to do. Even before he got hit, he was the crybaby of the family, worse than me, the youngest kid. But that freakin’ concussion probably messed him up even more.

David was right when he said Joey knew nothing. He had no good intentions, and got in the way of things because he tried to. He had no right to hate his own brother when he was only trying to help.

Maybe David was scared of Joey. To the other people he may have harmed, they didn’t care so much. But Joey was just a concentrated source of everything he feared - rejection.

I blinked.

David slapped my arm. “Loosen up, dude.”

Now Smash Mouth was playing, but since I zoned out, I missed most of the song. I didn’t recognize our surroundings, and I whipped my head around, trying to convince myself that we were in the right place.

He pulled something out of the cup holder that looked like a cigarette, only, it was chunky and lumpy, the ends twisted shut. He grabbed a lighter out of the cup holder, putting the object between his teeth. He flicked the lighter on and touched the flame to the end of it, and then inhaled real deep for ten seconds.

“Wha…what the hell is that?!” I stuttered.

David turned to me, smirking so the smoke poured out through his teeth. It stunk.

“Want one?”

My mouth dropped in response. “Wha - what?!”

“It ain’t dynamite. It’s not gonna kill you.”

I took a deep breath, despite the foul smoke flooding my lungs. “No…just, no.”

He rooted around in the console between us, finding another one and stuck it in my hand, his own shaking and sweaty. “I wouldn’t give it to you if I knew it wasn’t okay. C’mon.”

I knew better.

He meant those words. I heard them, and even though his eyes were bloodshot, they showed honesty. He had no intention of hurting me. Since he was high as a kite, though, he was too cloudy to realize he could’ve killed me. Matter of fact, I never met a cloud as thick as him.

You know that feeling where nothing really makes sense? Like, you try to comprehend some simple problem like, I don’t know, 2 + 2, and it takes you a minute to figure it out? Everything’s out of focus and you can never identify why. It’s just so weird. I don’t know if it was the smoke clouding up my brain or the daze I was in, but I was having the same sensation at the moment.

Without a clear thought in my head, I put the drug to my lips and fumbled with it. He stuck the fire dangerously close to my face, and he ignited the joint and did what he wanted to do.

Within the first second, I was coughing up mucous and tears were welling up in my eyes. David snatched it from my mouth.

“Holy shit, that was awful.”

He had a blank expression. Then for some reason, he broke out into all smiles, his freckled face almost looking sinister in the weak moonlight and glow of the dashboard. He tried to change the subject. Failed miserably. “So how’s life?”

“I don’t like you when you’re high.” There. I said it.

He ran a red light, slamming the gas on harder and holding the steering wheel so tight I almost thought it’d come off in his weathered hands. He bit his lip. I could see teeth marks forming on the skin underneath, turning red and glistening with drunken spit. The song sped up. I’d never heard it before. My heart was pounding and I knew his was too.

“Well, then, where the fuck has that been for the past three years?” he asked me.

So many things were left unsaid. I wanted to just open my mouth and let loose everything I’d ever kept in and questioned and thought about with David, but instead, I let fly something else. Something else that was wrong, and something else that I should’ve never said. It flipped everything upside down. I hate myself.

“David, you’re driving - no, living like this? You’re better than that, man. Why do you gotta bring yourself down like that?” I spat, holding his shoulder tightly.

He pulled over, slowed down dramatically, and coughed, looking down at the steering wheel.

“You’re gonna end up dead, man! You’re…this…this is gonna kill you, driving like this! You’re so much better than that. But…no…wait. You know what? If you’re choosing to do this, choosing to kill yourself, then, well, maybe you deserve to die.”

I opened the door and stepped out, looking back to say a few final words.

“Good night.”

His eyes watered up and he said one last word to me before I slammed the door right in his face.

“Sorry.”