44.
“The Backpack”
The place where Jenkins and his friends lived was a partially collapsed apartment building that had been painted two different shades of pink and was surrounded by sagging cyclone fencing. It was nouveau-Greek in structure and looked like the sort of place that, when the fire sparked in it, had been abandoned by Southern California transplants with a collectively naively childish sense of aesthetics. There was a courtyard in the building’s center, watched over by a statue of Adonis, a left-behind pair of boxers bunched up by his right foot. The external staircase and the fiberglass columns that line the staircase were still intact and the majority of the peonies stood fast in the neglected soil, their feathery petals gray with soot, but the roof was entirely eaten away and all the glass in the window frames and in the white-rimmed lanterns that lined the long hallway were shattered with jagged starbursts across their surfaces.
Jenkins and his cohorts, who were just a few kids much younger than him that he’d met at another squat, who’d followed him here when he discovered this place, attempted to utilize all the space they’d taken possession of by spreading out the few small objects they owned. There was a plastic bong in the center of a one-time bathroom in a unit upstairs, a skirt thrown from the second floor onto the courtyard, beer cans and bottles in each room, and on top of a dryer in what was once a laundry room, a backpack full of clean socks and underwear eventually deemed unnecessary and a photo album of a foster family who had proved impatient and bitter. Mostly, though, the boys inhabited an apartment on the first floor, in a corner of the building.
When Pammy and Christopher entered the living room, which was lit by a dozen or so candles nestled in paper bags from liquor stores, a short boy of about fifteen, who was in the middle of telling a story, looked over at them and called “Fire, look out!” The other two boys laughed at the familiar refrain, and Jenkins smirked over at Pammy, who went to sit on his lap. Christopher was left the only one standing, and resolutely took a seat on the floor next to a box of beer he grabbed a can of.
“So you guys escape from boarding school and left your smack in a desk drawer? That’s so sad.”
Jenkins was tall and lean with chin-length blonde hair that was longer in the back and stuck in s-like tendrils along the long surface of his always slightly damp neck. His sideburns were curly and sandy and traced his square jaw line. He was wearing light blue corduroy pants and a tattered black New York Dolls t-shirt, and on his forearm in dark black ink was a tattoo that said “FUCK LOVE.” Certainly, he appreciated the spontaneous festivity of having a guest, and he and Christopher were the kind of naturally festive boys who instantly understood each other, and so Jenkins planned to crack open the tension by using his authoritative, sexy humor. But then he felt a sudden pang of emasculation, as though someday soon he would lose his knack of levity in conversations, and so what he said as he squeezed Pammy’s hip was, “Did you buy this asshole at the Elvis store or what? Where’s the drugs?”
“Oh shit,” remembered Pammy, doing her best to ignore the situation she was in, “I think we might’ve missed the song I requested. Where’s the radio?” The boy who brought the radio to her especially got a kick out of watching her sing along with the dopey classic rock songs she liked so much. He was the kind of boy who no matter what was just not smart, and who didn’t talk much. One time though, when Pammy was over and they were all drinking, the boy thought that nobody else in the room would be able to hear him, so he leaned over and mumbled in Pammy’s ear, “I’m feeling it, man. I feel fucked up. I wish I was dead.” Pammy had heard this identical remark from friends and acquaintances she’d known her whole teenage life, and the unspectacular passion of his sadness had made her feel embarrassed.
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