We called it the Space Cruiser.
We “hot-boxed” the car, filled it with as much marijuana smoke as we could, music turned up loud to anything as we screamed at the top of our lungs, the battle cry of our fading youth.
SPACE CRUISING BY MARIO GALVAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 101
We called it The Space Cruiser. Glow-in-the-dark planets hung from the crimson roof. We blazed along the back roads between Jerome and Wendell, Idaho, Grace, Alex, Jordan, Chad, and I packed inside my old banged-up 1992 shit-brown Ford Taurus, our escape ship from the small town of Gooding where we lived.
We “hot-boxed” the car, filled it with as much marijuana smoke as we could, music turned up loud to anything as we screamed at the top of our lungs, the battle cry of our fading youth.
We were all around 18 to 20 escaping the rest of society. We were going to live, Goddamn it! That was what we wanted to do that night, live!
2009 was coming to an end and the winter winds blew through the Magic Valley.
“Hey Alex, man, what time are we going to meet him?” Chad asked. His bulbous nose poked out of a curtain of long blond hair. He held a short green pipe that resembled a frog with two toads near the carb on the side in which one could rest their thumb. He packed a bowl, lit up, puffed up his cheeks twice, and exhaled a cloud of smoke with a small cough at the end. “Here dude,” he managed to push out, as he passed it to Jordan.
“Fuck yeah,” Jordan’s boney fingers curled around the pipe. He was the tallest of us and he sat like a crouched scarecrow, his hair like a mop over his face. Snake-bite piercings gleamed in the street lights.
Miss May I’s Porcelain Wings blasted through the speakers. Jordan’s long legs bounced up and down as if he were on a drum set with double-bass pedals, “ Turn it up!” he yelled. A mess of black hair flew around as he banged his head back and forth. Jordan lit up and inhaled just at the moment the band shouted, “My eyes are bloodshot! They have seen the damned!”
Grace, in the passenger seat, held the piece to my mouth. I inhaled, my eyes on the road. She passed the bowl along to Alex, sitting behind her.
“Hey! He asked you a question,” she glared at Alex. Her temper rose out of impatience. “Hello, hey get off your phone.” She reached back and smacked the flip-phone out of his hand.
“Why do you have to be such a bitch?” Alex yelled at her. These two were always going at each other. They dated months earlier but were broken up by this time. They were still friends but a tension still hung between them. They had similar tastes, listened to the same type of music, and wore identical clothing. They had even swapped pants. They wore My Chemical Romance brand T-shirts with checkered vans, and multiple studded belts.
Alex picked up his phone. “I was just texting him. He wants us to meet him at Walmart at seven,” he said. He passed the bowl back to Chad.
“Right on, I got 20 on it,” Chad responded. Everyone else chimed in with what they wanted to contribute to our meet-up with Mr Satan.