Talk about not having an ego--Stony killed himself with a plastic bag. He put it around his head and drowned in his own exhalations. He died from his own living breath! I heard he shot someone in Florida, and that his life had gone downhill after that. I was the first person he had ever sat next to on the bus, back in ninth grade, right there in the second to last row, this pudgy kid walked confidently up to my half-empty seat and asked if he could sit next to me. Of course I said yea, and we got to know each other briefly.
I knew he had anger, sort of, but not the brand of anger that shoots somebody, or let alone shoot somebody and start kicking their body while they lay on the ground. I don't think the person died, and in fact I heard the person had only been shot somewhere in the arm or the shoulder. Maybe the person lay there in shock, maybe he or she played dead--I won't know. But Stony shot someone. I also know that Stony wasn't a bad guy.
I don't know why he was in Florida when that happened. If I recall correctly, his mother lived down there. He lived with his father in HoCo when he and I had met, and I don't know if he considered me his first friend, his only, a meaningful friend, or a friend at all, but he was mad when a newer guy sat next to me from an earlier stop, this guy we called Greg Thanewguy (that's how I put him in my phone back then). Anyway, I never asked for Stony's number, and I didn't fight too hard to say that the other fifty percent of my bus seat wasn't actually vacant, but maybe I had a disarming vibe back then where new kids had less trouble approaching me. Maybe it was because I had been the new guy so many times, or maybe it was Greg Thanewguy's awkward inertia that carried him to the back of the bus on the first day he stepped onto it and had no choice but to desperately ask if the one open spot was open. I remember when Stony stepped onto the bus and saw tall, skinny, awkward Greg Thenewguy sitting next to me with his backpack on his legs, but Stony muffled something that was meant to be heard but I didn't hear it. He put on his headphones and Slipknot could be heard growling out of his earphones a few seats up.
Anyway, so I think Stony only attended school for about a year or two longer, but since my mother had moved thus changing my bus route, and since we were all on the precipice of a driver's license, I am not sure how the seating dynamic continued really after that year. Stony didn't sit next to me again, and I don't recall feeling too worried about it. I remember his getting out of hand from time to time, but it was only in the sense of a rowdy chubby kid trying to make his peers laugh with the only means he had--over exuberant physicality. I remember he would poke the back of the heads of kids in front of us, or he would yell PENIS as loud as he could, or do dips between the seat and kick his feet around. It was annoying, but it wasn't anything atypical.
Then one day he quit coming to school. He got suspended for breaking a window. Then he got caught spray painting the trailer classrooms and the gym doors. Then he fought someone who made fun of his dad's boyfriend. Then he just quit coming to school. No one knew why, but people could make their guesses. Our homogeneous school body had rejected him like a bad kidney, sent him--no, catapulted him--to Florida.
I heard he started selling weed down there. This was around eleventh or twelfth grade, or after. I remember hearing he had a gun, but didn't believe it the way I wanted to believe it. I didn't hear much after that, and after a while, it seemed like I had reached a point to where it almost became normal in my mind--I ended up meeting other people who sold weed, other people who had guns, and other people who invested in both. I remember having a handgun pointed at me in jest, another time someone forgetting their gun next to my couch, and I remember unzipping a duffel bag in someone's pickup only to find a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun. I remember the same kid reassuring me that it was only to scare people, that it was only loaded with beanbags, and that he would figure out what to do later when that point came where, even if no one was murdered, there was an inevitable case for assault with a deadly weapon were he to ever use it. I remember thinking, "All this for green?" Even so, even with all of us sipping a lofty cocktail of invincibility and curiosity, it never seemed real.
I don't know when or where it was when I heard that Stony shot somebody. I think it was at Hugo's. Hugo was a genuine kid who also toed the margins of acceptance in our white-washed school, unless, of course, he was throwing a party--then everyone showed up. I think it was inside his dad's garage, through a cloud of cigarette smoke where I heard that Stony shot someone. One of Hugo's friends was friends with Stony's brother. Stony's brother had stayed behind, had chosen not to go to Florida, and instead expressed his defiance through studded denim and a mowhawk. Stony's brother was a year younger, but looked years older--he didn't have the boyish pudge of Stony. He was quiet and brooding, unlike his brother, and usually kept his back against the wallflower wall, too. I remember seeing him tonguing his lip ring a lot.
I think it was in that garage when I heard that, down in a Florida parking lot, Stony had handed someone a half ounce of weed, expecting to be paid the standard 180 dollars that it cost back then for said amount. I heard, instead, the kid turned and ran with the bag, and Stony, whether cursed by impulse, heavy legs or probably both, lifted his pistol and fired.
The story is as hazy as the night I heard it. The details are filtered through the mouths of many, through the minds of more, and embedded by half-lives somewhere in the ore of my decaying memory of him. I heard Stony shot the guy in the back, or his arm, or his shoulder, that the kid fell to the ground and Stony started kicking him. I know nothing after that. I just couldn't believe he actually did it.
I don't know what happened to him after that, or before the last thing I ever heard about him. Just a simple search on Google initially lead to no traces of his existence. I clicked Google Images only to find a swath of different faces. Then suddenly I saw it, that baby face pudge emerging like a live ghost, like a face from a black lake. Staring back at me was Stony, with a flatbrim Ecko Unltd. hat, heavy peach fuzz on his upper lip. I clicked the picture, and sure enough there he was, on a myspace account which now seems like a preserved artifact. I looked at the few pictures he had existing, one of his pet snake, some pictures making funny faces, friends drinking handles of rum in random apartment living rooms. One picture bore the caption, "My life style is party hard. My drink of choice, the CAPTAIN," yet the photo was of his brother holding a bottle of Port Royal. His location did not say Florida; it said our hometown--Lisbon, Maryland.
I don't where it happened when he did the next thing, or who found him. I don't even really know why he did it, other than what I'd suspect was an unbearable existence, probably riddled with legal problems, possible addiction, and the lightning quick realization that it is very easy to disappoint everyone you know. I don't know why he chose to use the bag--maybe because it was the cleanest exit, maybe because it wouldn't hurt, maybe because it would take just long enough for someone to find him in the nick of time. I don't know why he did it, but he did.
Somewhere in this timespan came a complete reversal of invincibility. That same stinging warmth we all used to carry around infectiously, feverishly inside an impenetrable bubble of youth, the same youth that led us to believe that we could operate the way we did, had vanished for Stony. For the rest of us, we still had our red carpets to walk on; they would unfold until one by one we would earn our first couple, very privileged strikes, or until the monsters we create came to life and consume us whole.
I never knew Stony more than I wanted to, but I know that I would now give up my seat for him, and not out of fear. It's because he became real to me again.
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