My Chum Missy
My high school girlfriend Missy was always getting
involved with old married bikers. She was half
Cherokee and very good looking and wore slutty
clothes. At the beginning of the Iraq war, back in
‘90, Missy found an ad in the paper asking people to
write letters to anonymous GI’s and she conned me into
doing it with her.  We got kind of competitive as to
who could collect the most letters and my shoe box
turned into a couple liquor boxes. Most of the guys
who wrote me back were stuck on some ship in the gulf
and bored as rocks and asked me to send them VHS tapes
and photos. I posed Missy in front of a nice looking
irrigation ditch in her black leather jacket and then
I wore her jacket and she snapped my picture. I
printed her up a hundred or so mini portraits to send
to her guys. A few weeks later she wanted the
negatives because she thought her mother would find
out and kill her.

I found myself going out with Missy on her bizarre
adventures because of boredom, a lack of self-respect,
and fear of her getting raped. One evening I was
dumbfounded to be in the house of some married
mechanic with Missy and this guy’s co-worker (the wife
still at work) drinking beer and watching these guys
smoke weed. They were rather polite and pretty sure
they were going to get laid. “We have to go,” I kept
saying over and over. Then this guy is asking Missy
to lay down on the couch, and she does. 
“My mother is going to kill me,” she says, and I
wonder if that is because she’s laying coyly on the
silver-with-brown-flowers-couch-with-matching-chairs
of a married mechanic, or because of what she plans to
do.

I can’t take my eyes off the picture of this guy and
his wife on the end table and I think if the wife
looks that pissed off in the JCPenny studio, I wonder
how pissed off she’s going to look when she finds
Missy and I in her living room. I watch the hands on
the clock approach the universal quittin’ time of five
o’clock and I am at the door saying “We’re going to
be late, etcetera, etcetera,” and this guy is asking
Missy to take off her shirt. And she does. I field
the other guy and go out to the driveway, stand by the
car. A little while later she comes out and this guy
is begging us desperately to stay. Missy is laughing,
buttoning her shirt, sliding smuttily across the hood
of her car.

A few weeks later I am riding in the front seat of a
Camaro with some blonde-haired, probably married,
father of one, beer-drinking, office-working
freakazoid. Missy is making out with some other guy
in the back seat, and we are driving to Pennsylvania
in the middle of the night to find the secret lair of
a Satanic cult. This guy is telling me he knows the
confidential location and it’s really hard to find
because the entrance is hidden, but you can find it
from the trees with branches all pointing the same
direction. I’m sure we’re just gonna drive around
drunkenly for an hour or two, listening to this guy’s
bottomless treasure trove of ghost stories, and never
find the place until, lo and behold, there up ahead
are two huge trees with branches pointing in the same
direction on either side of a barely visibly jeep
trail. The asshole pulls into the road, scraping the
Camaro’s underbelly on the cold grass, and Missy loses
her shit in the backseat. “Oh my God! Turn around!”
she screams. Her arms are flailing all around the
driver’s head as we bump along into the dense forest,
branches scraping both sides of the car. I am about
to try to bail out since I don’t want to be raped by
these dorks when a pack of really scary Dobermans
surround the car, showing their teeth in the windows.
Still he drives on, turning off his lights and we’re
at this big warehouse with lots of windows and
flickering lights in the windows and the guy in the
backseat, who hasn’t said one word all evening yells,
“Shut up!” and everyone in the car is silent and then
the dogs are quiet and gone and sure as anything we
hear chanting. A lot of people chanting and the
shadows of people walking in a circle against the
windows. All four of us are immediately screaming,
beating the driver about the head and neck. A dark
figure is coming out of the building now, and then
another holding a candle and our driver is grinding
gears throwing it in reverse and we are slamming
against the doors, the dash, as we accelerate
backwards through the blackness, the Camaro loses a
hubcap and then the front clip as we careen out onto
the paved road, and the driver is crying now for his
car parts as he obeys the speed limit and we’re all
wondering if the Satanists will be waiting back at
this guy’s apartment for us to hex us for our invasion
and the driver is mumbling angrily about his job and
his future hangover and he doesn’t even invite us in
when we get back to his place.


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