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My Friend Brendan

by Jamina Creason

November 2010

My friend Brendan is smoking a Marlboro Ultra Light cigarette. My friend Brendan likes Marlboro Ultra Lights because they taste like chemicals. The taste of chemicals reminds him of the city.

“How green was my fucking valley,” he says. “What the fuck am I doing in the middle of Wacksville, Ohio?”

“You’re looking like a fucking poseur,” I say.

“Right,” my friend Brendan says, sneering and taking a long drag from his cigarette. “You don’t want to start shit with me right now, Jess. I’ve got mad evil in me. Put it this way – have you ever tried to pick up your teeth with broken fingers?”

My friend Brendan, who has also never tried to pick up my teeth with broken fingers, always wears long sleeves. He is the most well-dressed person in my immediate circle of friends. His tendency to wear expensive sports coats over blue jeans and white t-shirts affords him the dubious image of James Dean crossed with Miami Vice. The contrast of his dark hair against his pale skin as he puffs on his white cigarette and flashes his white teeth has me mesmerized.

“Give me a cigarette,” I tell him. “Fucking hipster.”

I hate Marlboro Ultra Light Cigarettes, because they taste like chemicals. I only want one because I want my friend Brendan.

“Listen, shorty,” my friend Brendan says, “I’ve stuck needles in my arm bigger than you.”

I laugh and light my cigarette. My friend Brendan is hilarious.

I sit there, on the floor of my friend Brendan’s dorm room, watching him as he expertly inhales clouds of cancerous smoke, bathed in the soft glow of his computer monitor. I have been spending more and more time in this room lately, utterly hypnotized by my friend Brendan’s sarcastic nihilism.

After a few moments of silence, my friend Brendan says, “Jess. You don’t still have any of those pills you were selling a while ago, do you?”

I shake my head. “Sorry, man, I fuckin’ lost ‘em all. We could smoke some weed if you want.”

“Oh, God, no,” says my friend Brendan, putting out his cigarette in an empty can of Mountain Dew. “Come on, Jasmine. You know I don’t do that hippie shit.” He sighs. “Just my luck to end up at a liberal arts school with no fucking drugs. Fucking unbelievable. Well, looks like another jug-of-Carlo-Rossi-night for me.”

My friend Brendan has captivated me with his ex-junkie wit and charm. I often feel like I’m the only one who fully appreciates his unique sensibilities. My friend Brendan doesn’t talk to anyone else about drugs and life like he does with me. We have an understanding, a special connection.

For a second, I feel like maybe I shouldn’t laugh at why my friend Brendan has just said. For a second, I think maybe I should say something about how it’s probably not healthy to be drinking a jug of red wine every night. Especially when you’re allergic to sulfites. But instead, I laugh, exhaling arsenic-infused cigarette smoke. My friend Brendan, sighing, spins around in his desk chair with unnecessary flourish and engages with his computer. Soon, sedated dance music fills the room.

“Did you go to that party a couple nights ago?” I ask, attempting to continue the conversation so that my presence wouldn’t become awkward. I already know that he did not, in fact, go to that party a couple nights ago, because I had been there the entire night, hoping in vain that he would show. I turn my gaze from the back of Brendan’s head to the Tricky poster on his wall in an effort to make it seem like I don’t care all that much about his answer to my question.

My friend Brendan, caught up in the search for a particular song on his computer, doesn’t turn around. “No,” he says, effectively negating my attempt to continue our dialogue. I nod my head. It’s worth another try.

“Everyone was there, man. You should’ve stopped by,” I say, hoping to open another avenue of conversation.

“Everyone but yours truly,” he says. “I had too much work to do.”

“Oh. Yeah, I was wondering why you weren’t with Beckie.”

“Beckie was there?”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

My friend Brendan turns around in his chair with an incredulous look on his face. “Are you sure she was there?” he says. “She told me she didn’t go.”

“Oh. That’s weird,” I say. Beckie is my friend Brendan’s girlfriend, and also a friend of mine. I am not aware of the fact that she had told Brendan that she was not at this particular party. But I am aware of the fact that she has been cheating on him, and that this particular party was one of the places where said cheating had occurred. I know this because she told me. But she also made me promise never to let anyone know, a promise which I keep, despite the fact that if I were dating my friend Brendan, I would never cheat on him.

“What the fuck, yo?” my friend Brendan says. “Why would she say she wasn’t there, then? She’s been lying about all sorts of shit lately.”

“I don’t know, man,” I say, in a tone that I immediately recognize as unconvincing. I have suddenly been confronted with a moral dilemma, which I try to ignore by putting my cigarette out in another Mountain Dew can. I have never been one to take on moral dilemmas.

“Jess. You know something, don’t you? You have to tell me. You’re my fucking friend. If there’s something I should know, you have to tell me.”

I shrug my shoulders in a weak attempt to ignore his demands. My friend Brendan has twisted his face, a face accustomed only to bored stares and devilish grins, into an expression of pain and confusion.

This pain and confusion quickly seeps into me, easily crushing my hopelessly unprepared defenses. “Dude, please, Brendan, man, I can’t say anything, dude, I’m sorry, I promised, I don’t know what’s going on. I think you should just go talk to her about it.”

My friend Brendan stares into my eyes, angry, unbelieving. I am more than a little aroused. “What did she tell you?” There’s no hope left for me.

The repercussions of my response to this moral dilemma will be far greater than I can possibly imagine right now. I would like to think that did the right thing by telling my friend Brendan the truth. I believe that my friend Brendan thinks I did the right thing in telling him the truth, a truth which inspired him to leave the room immediately in order to break up with Beckie. After this, I sit in his room uncomfortably for a while before venturing out into the hallway, directionless, wishing I hadn’t lost all of my Phenobarbitol.

“Whose fucking friend are you?” Beckie says. She, accompanied by our friend Naomi, has just run into me in the hallway.

Before I have time to answer, Beckie punches me in the face. I have never been punched in the face before. I put a hand to my throbbing cheekbone and take a step backwards, sandwiching myself between Beckie and the hallway wall. Another punch lands on the other side of my face. I put my hands into my pockets, trying to show my non-aggression. I have no desire to fight this girl. I don’t know if I even have the capacity to fight this girl. So, I stand there, hands in pockets, and receive an onslaught of punches to various parts of my body, mostly my face, before Beckie decides that I’ve had enough.

In the following minutes, Beckie will go to her room and attempt to physically mutilate herself with a broken Gilette Mach 3 razorblade. I will follow her there, and manage to stop her from succeeding by physically restraining her and feeding her some Klonopin. Naomi, cowlike, will watch these events unfold from a comfortable physical/emotional distance. A few weeks later, my boyfriend will break up with me and I will sleep with my friend Brendan. It will be less satisfying than what I had imagined. I will also ask him to shoot me up with crystal meth for the first time. That will be just as satisfying as I always expected it to be. The summer will come, and we all will go our separate ways. My boyfriend and I will get back together and spend the summer homeless on Venice Beach. My friend Brendan will go home to Pittsburgh, meet up with his old friends, and be re-inducted into the junkie lifestyle which he had given up for six months. When school starts again, he will tell no one but me. I will then take it upon myself to find my friend Brendan clean needles and as many hard drugs as possible, until we establish a steady connection with one of the many crack dealers that live in town. Despite my boyfriend’s disapproval, my friend Brendan and I will start selling drugs to finance our new habits. One day, in my friend Brendan’s room, I will break the promises I made to my boyfriend never to shoot up or do crack again, and I will not tell him about it. Some days later, my friend Brendan will tell me that I probably shouldn’t be sharing needles with him because he could be infected. I will decide that there’s no point in stopping now.

All of this is inevitable, but walking back to my friend Brendan’s room on a cloudless Ohio night, face sore from Beckie’s persistent knuckles, ears ringing from her half-choked screams, I have no way of knowing it. Still, something tells me that it might be better not to go back to his room, not to succumb to my infatuation with his casual, confident self-destruction. But where else would I go? No one else understands drugs and life like me and my friend Brendan. Certainly not the people in the psych unit of the Cedar County General Hospital that I will end up in less than a year later, committed by the college Counseling Center, which I will go to for advice and emotional support after I finally tell my (soon to be ex-)boyfriend that I’ve been shooting up with my friend Brendan, and, oh, yeah, we might have HIV.

By this time, my friend Brendan is long gone.

He sold his textbooks to buy crack – they were useless ever since he stopped going to class. It became obvious that something was wrong with him when he started sweating all the time, and shaking uncontrollably. And the long sleeves. Always long sleeves. I was the only one who ever saw what went on under those sleeves. But then he started trying to cheat me out of money. And drugs. When I found out, I exploded. I didn’t really care about him ripping off other people, even people that we considered friends. But me? I was supposed to be different. We were supposed to be partners.

In retaliation, I told everyone exactly what had been going on with my friend Brendan. No one was very surprised. Not long afterwards, he disappeared. Most of us think that his parents, who had been drug testing him ever since he got out of rehab, paid him a visit, saw what was happening to him, and took him out of school.

I will never see my friend Brendan again.

I will spend the night alone, in a plastic bed and plastic gown. I will have made the mistake of being honest with my inquisitors, and as a result I will have been diagnosed as having a chemical dependency on marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine, ecstasy, pscilocybin mushrooms, heroin, LSD, methamphetamine, opium, alcohol, and ketamine; everything on the hospital’s list of addictive drugs except for PCP, which is nearly impossible to get a hold of. And as I look around the sterile white room, friendless, possessionless, and far more depressed than I had been prior to visiting the Counseling Center, I will tell myself this is for the best, that I will be out of here soon, that I did the right thing by telling the truth.

Jamina Creason was born in Oakland, CA. She grew up in the Los Angeles area, then moved to the midwest to study Philosophy and Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently living and working as a musician in Austin, TX.