48
I remember the 7 foot tall mad genius with a body like walking bones, eyes that’d seen fire. His name was Daniel Shepphard. We called him Shep.
“I’ve set myself on fire eight times,” he told me out in the front lawn where he was working on a moving catapult vehicle for Burning Man , “in the last week.”
I tell people that he’s a heroin addict because it was the tragedy that ran around him in circles - but I don’t want to be defined by my breakups or my alcoholism or my sex addiction - so I’ll say that he’s the mad genius, the engineer who graduated with a degree in robotics, the blues musician and the gun enthusiast. We were all afraid we’d wake up and find him dead. I heard a gun blast in the other room and when my boyfriend and my sort-of girlfriend and I emerged from the room where we were having our interrupted threesome we found him in the living room, shaking, tension wrapping up his body like a knot. He’d shot a bullet at the foot of our resident coke-addict, a blood-in-the-lungs walking piece of human filth named Scurvy.
“He wouldn’t leave me alone,” Shep said, as my boyfriend (Otherwise known as Stranger) holds out his hand for the gun. And I’ve never seen wounded quite like this. “I warned him, and he wouldn’t leave me alone.”
As if it was the most natural reaction in the world - and it seemed to me that it was, as it solved his problem - to shoot a gun at the foot of a person who wouldn’t stop screaming in your face. To have him run off into the night.
He often sat in the music room, at his computer. He was a freelance engineer, but it bored him, oftentimes he and his girlfriend Josie ran out of money because he couldn’t sustain work. And when he wasn’t at his computer, he was outside working on his vehicular catapult or at a show or practicing with his electric guitar until the walls screamed.
He kept trying to kick heroin. My boyfriend prepared him drink concoctions that were made out of vodka and jalapenos, among other things, while Shep was withdrawing. I listened through the door as he began to vomit in the kitchen.
“I’m so tired,” Shep said, between heaving, and I’d never known weariness quite like that. “I didn’t think I’d survive the 80s, but here I am, and I’m so tired.”
And when I was sick with a cold, as I often got colds in that place, with its dirty floors and blood on the walls and people always sleeping in my room, he handed me a bottle of Nyquil. The weight in his fingers reverberated through me.
“I was saving that for a rainy afternoon, but I don’t think my liver can handle it anymore,” he said.
He often had people telling stories in the middle of their band sets - The Gutbunny Revival, they were called - and my boyfriend showed him one of my poems. Something I’d written when I was 18 in response to people bothering me about still being a virgin, that ended with cursing at historical figures.
“I’m not even sure she can talk,” he said, nodding toward me.
Back in those days I was a mute little girl, still hidden behind a thick nest of dark brown hair, my fingers always grasping the edges of tables and walls to steady myself.
“Just read it,” the boyfriend said, peering over his shoulder as he sat at the computer, orienting his chair and
He finished reading the poem, and began laughing, and laughing. He almost couldn’t stay in his chair.
“I never knew,” he said, and looked at me with the fire, the face that could set himself on flames 7 times in a week and laugh about it. “Autumn, you’re a goddamn genius.”
Once I stayed home while most of the house went downtown to see a show. The boyfriend and I are watching “Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog” when about halfway through we hear Josie and Shep screaming at each other in the next room. I pause the show and Stranger goes into the anteroom just as Shep and Josie spill out of their room, pushing at each other and screaming about the dogs. Josie wants to leave them and take the dogs with her.
“Do what you want,” Shep said, “but you won’t take my dogs. I will not have another house taken away from me.”
He ends up shoving her out the front door and she cracks her head on the concrete steps on the porch. I think she’s gone, but she comes back, shoves Shep over the arm of the couch. Stranger pulls them apart. Josie leaves again. Comes back. They run outside to fight. Shep gives Stranger his gun. He gives me his knives. So that he won’t lose it and start hurting her or himself.
Inside they start fighting again by the front door. I pull Shep, this 6 foot tall 40 year old heroin addict, away from Josie. He’s frail from lack of food, frail from a lifetime of burning and beating and screaming.
Stranger holds Josie away.
“If you leave I’ll blow my brains out,” Shep keeps saying. Josie ends up taking the dogs and Stranger follows her outside. I follow Shep into the band room as he sits at his computer.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She got bored and I got jealous,” he said.
I hand him more whiskey to drink.
Stranger comes back and explains that Josie is just taking the dogs as a comfort thing, that she’s just down the street sleeping on a neighbor’s couch.
“You’re both drunk,” he said, “she’ll be back in the morning.”
Stranger and I sit in Shep’s room. We drink more whiskey. I smoke a cigarette, even though I don’t smoke.
“I love that girl,” he says, “I love her more than she loves me.”
And a year later when he blew his brains out, I was sitting in the freezing cold QA room at Zynga, so wrapped up in my own issues I didn’t even think I could leave to go to his wake.
It takes a special kind of skill to live and keep on living with those burning eyes.
48
“Do you sonder?” the sheep asks the wolves, as they tear her intestines out.
Do you indeed. Eat and eat, but I don’t think.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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