More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you care, you’ll learn one thing from another.
Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them,
But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words.
But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them.
Who knows what turned Romeo’s eyes her way, but Mariah felt like she’d won the lottery, and Romeo acted that way too: like she’d won the lottery.
This is the era of cars beginning to get the fancy circuitry in everything from power windows to brakes, just so they can lose their complete minds at the drop of a hat.
But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.
The n-word is preferred by those guys. Mr. Peg said other people made up the n-word, not Ice Cube. And other people made up hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Not Mr. Peg’s words, but that’s how I understood it. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit.
A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off
...more
It’s fair to say I was halfway in love or some damn thing with Miss Barks. And the other half of me was like, Lady, you are the ass-burn of my life, and I wish me and you had been born on different planets. I know, guy life. Get used to it.
a person could get used to anything except hanging by the neck.
“Just smell that,” she said. “Fall time.” Plowed-under silage fields, smoke from people’s leaf burning, and something a little bit sweet, maybe apples that had rotted on the ground.
But here’s the thing, she told me, you don’t give up, sometimes you just have to take second choice.
The rules are made by soil and rain and slope. Leaving your family’s land would be like moving out of your own body. That land is alive, a body itself, with its own talents and, I guess you could say, addictions.
Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school, free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell, and a carton got such taxes on it, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with “Proud Tobacco Farmer” stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.
I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.
A mean side to people comes out at such times, where their only concern is what did the misfortunate person do to put themselves in their sorry fix. They’re building a wall to keep out the bad luck.
It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.
But in a city, the rules do not apply. It’s like everybody is bored of all the normal things, out looking for the weirder option.
She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what’s doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.
that was him teaching us: a person can keep his head up and rise high, even if he wasn’t lucky enough to get born up there.
Just showing up doesn’t get you anywhere in life.
But the main thing is, whatever you’re doing, who is it making happy? Are you selling the cheapest-ass shoes imaginable to Walmart shoppers, or high-class suits to business guys? Even the same exact work, like sanding floors, could be at the Dollar General or a movie star mansion. Show me your paycheck, I’ll make a guess which floor. If you are making a rich person happy, or a regular person feel rich, aka better than other people, the money rolls. If it’s lowlifes you’re looking after, not so much. And if it’s kids, good luck, because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on
...more
The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.
He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.
I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore.
I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning.
If you ever met a middle school girl, you know what they are: volcano eruptions of bullshit. Every minute a new emergency, the best friend turned enemy.
I told Angus my mom being dead wasn’t something I pinned exactly on my birthday. “It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”
Why did I want that so much, to go back to the place where my childhood got crushed? After we went, I knew. The reason was power. To face down Amityville and yell at whatever still crept or clawed inside, “Fuck you. Fuck your thrashings and starving us and making all of us but mostly Tommy wish we were dead. Fuck you for making me glad it was him and not me.” To hocker and spit on the frozen grass. Turn my back on evil and walk away.
Ms. Annie said all God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones that clean it up.
Some call that addiction. Some say love. Fine line.
Maybe because I was finally ready for something that good to happen for me.
I’m hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy.
All the way up, or all the way down. That was me now, getting beat with both ends of that stick before any day’s end, never both at once, and not much in between.
Addiction
don’t look for money to buy your life back,
Nothing is as important as health early on
I’d spent so much of my life hungry, and these days were no different. Every minute I craved that feeling with another person, being that close.
I lit Mr. Peg’s funeral candles and opened the bottle and poured the Thunderbird into paper cups. It felt like church, the part where they say, Remember who died for your sins. For Dori and me, all our best people died on us early, before we had any good shot at sin. So we had catching up to do. Maybe that’s why nothing we ever did felt wrong.
Her sparkly eyes were not really black, but blue. Bending down to kiss her, I’d see the thinnest crescent of sky blue around the huge black center. Living a life like hers, most people would have lost it a thousand times over.
Those PO boxes were all stuffed with disability checks, and these with the white paper bags of drugs that the checks paid for.
Maybe all kids are like this, wanting too much. Like Maggot, working every angle too far, to blow the gaskets of his poor grandparents that married at fifteen with no bigger hope in the world than to have kids and not watch them die. Us though, give us the fucking world. We pretended we were as good as the Bettina Cook kids, while Bettina pretended to be a Kardashian. We’d all cut our teeth on TV shows where parents had jobs, and kids lived out big-city dreams in their wardrobe choices and rivers of cash. Even doing drugs, these forgivable schoolboys, and it’s a comedy because they’re not
...more
Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.
Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.
If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.
“Whatever you love about her, you get to live with. And the other stuff, you live with that too.”
“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”
Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.
“One other person can go a long way towards making your world right,” she said, “but the support has to run both ways.”
Saying love has to come from a strong place, not just grabbing whatever’s in reach. You can’t choose your family, but a partner is your shot at a decent do-over.
You see what people do with money if they have it, it’s two different universes. Theirs and ours.
