The remnants of a two dollar ale splattered Aaron’s Tom’s hoodie with the red kiss of Margot Susan messy and regretful on his cheek.

We had spent a week preparing him for this, and then, seeing her with Skip Mark, plans went to shit, he lost his temper and all sense of proportion.  He’s lucky it was her pitying lips and not Skip’s Mark’s fist.

Her brother, Nick Sam, looked on, phased on lithium and depressed despite it, miserable but docile.  He didn’t care if we killed each other, and we might have, if not for the piss drunk histrionics of Elisa Laura, attention-starved and guilt-tripping like a bitch Kerouac, not even pretty.

So we ran away left –  Aaron Tom, Elisa Laura and me I – and David Stew tagged along because no one liked him much and he didn’t have a place with anyone, so why not us?

The point was to get Aaron Tom fucked up, even though that had been our only recourse for the past month and it still wasn’t getting us him anywhere.

“You’re better off without her,” was the common refrain, but there wasn’t anyone who believed he was better off, or better than her, or not just better off dead.

I We made David Stew swipe his brother’s codeine, because what else was he good for, and we mixed it with ten dollar vodka and gave Aaron Tom as much as he wanted, because, fuck.

We stormed Ocean Beach at two in the morning and startled a wino who was drinking better shit than us.

We shoplifted candy bars we didn’t even eat while David Stew bought a porno mag from a chink shop owner who would have paid us just to leave his shop.

We pushed ourselves in our debauchery because we were motivated in nothing else.

Then we returned to Elisa’s Laura’s basement and made use of her parent’s abdication of responsibility.  We She was a lost cause.

Two hours into our boredom revelry, Elisa Laura and I apathetically, tragically, vaguely silently screwed again, while Aaron Tom dissolved into the couch and David Stew ineptly migrated home, unable to help his being straight as a narc.

Alone, Aaron Tom finished the bottle.

And the next morning, we he woke up, for better or worse.