Dancing with Downers

Dugan was someone that everyone knew. Not a lot of people knew how incredibly lame he was growing up. Especially looking at him now all dolled up and dyed you wouldn't really guess that he wore bottle cap glasses and was trying to bang my sister when he was a freshman. By the time I was in high school his glam was in full swing. He was good at it too. He consistently wore a mid drift and skinny jeans. Wild hair and make up, always. He drew on his eyebrows and wore a gay pride bottle cap necklace. The god of glitter. He was an elitist, or at least he made you feel like he was. I don't know how we met, and I dont know how we became friends. I just know it happened, and it was horrifying and bliss all at the same time. I really hung out with him daily after I graduated. I kinda dipped my toes in the drug scene so thats probably how we met. In high school I was pretty against drugs. I wouldn't talk to people who had done acid. I drank Everclear two nights a week, but somehow I felt that was different.

When I was 19 I had this apartment in Warwood. It was the third floor, one bedroom, with cherry wallpaper in the kitchen. I loved it. My childhood friend Misa and I lived there and we worked down the street. When we;d get out around midnight we;d always walk home together, feeling like grown ups. We never had money even though the job we had paid well. All there ever was in the fridge was beer, and there were many nights of Easy Mac. Sometimes we would go into town and go out to the bar, bring a band home. There were always people living with us. At one point Dugan was sleeping on our couch or bed. He never worked the entire time I knew him. He always got away with smoking your cigarettes and crashing at your place. Misa's boyfriend at the time was this ultra redneck named Ben. One night I was at work and he came over with a friend of his BJ. We lovingly called him Blow Job for a very very long time. BJ was sweet and hilarious. He would come over with his stars and bars belt buckle, get drunk, and sing Karaoke Revolution for hours. Of course Dugan hated him immediately. I remember coming home and he was all up in arms dragging me upstairs saying "I fucking hate these people." I went upstairs and there was the most awkward union of people sitting in the living room. Dugan and Snow (I will save that intro, she needs a post of her own) extreme to every sense of the word, blaring M.S.I. and three hillbillies drinking Bud. Snow and I got wasted and were telling them that M.S.I. was really sending subconscious messages to their brains. I said in attempts to fuck with them, "One day you're gonna wake up with a drag queens dick in your mouth, and you're gonna like it!" It was ironic because maybe a month later Dugan and BJ were banging. Yes, the good ol' Blow Job, boy from Florida, was in love with the biggest fag in town.

Slowly Dugan destroyed him. He found out about his trust fund, and blew it in no time. Hair dye, barbiturates, opiates, pot, blow, hallucinogens, and grub. Thousands of dollars completely wasted on bullshit. I lived four houses down from them at the time so I got in on it quite a lot. BJ got a tramp stamp and a mohawk and his own little mid drift. Soon we were just carbon copies of each other. After the money ran out things got desperate. Dugan had an abscess tooth for years to get pills. He never got it taken care of and I'm sure it hurt like hell. After awhile hospitals started shutting him down. Instead of tabs he got a business card for a therapist. We'd have to drive out of state to get anything. We'd sit in the parking lot bitching and waiting for him to come out. Once he tried to get me to run over his foot so he could go to the hospital. I did it. I mean after awhile of hanging out with him you would have hit him with a car too. Another time he wanted up to break his hand with a crow bar. Even then I felt like somehow this was all laughable. It was all a part of the dance.

He was down right cruel a lot of the time. He could manipulate you into anything and then berate you when you couldn't follow through. Like moving into your house and getting you loaded everyday. Then when there wasn't any food, or your boyfriend got tired of his crap he would lose it on you and completely ostracize you from all of your friends. Which really, all of the "friends" you had were just his followers. He would put you up on his pedestal and you never realized how high the fall was. I didn't talk to anyone besides him and his toadies for probably near a year. They did my make up and showed me how to sew my jeans into skinnys. I always wore a fur coat like Snow. I was loud like them, and cruel like them, and I disregarded anyone in my life that tried to make me see that. We'd drive around in BJ's car blaring the Party Monster album. I swear we had our own language. Everything was an inside joke. The crazier you acted, the funnier it was, the more desperate you seemed, and the more you fit in. I liked feeling wild. I liked feeling like I was doing something wrong. I wore fishnets and guarders, and had an edgy haircut. A new color every week. It was fun to feel like you were a part of something even if it was really fucked up. I liked being invited to parties and Dugan clinging to me at a show. Dugan needed people to have this perception of him. I know he never felt that way about himself, but after I left Wheeling and watched it all happening from the outside I couldn't believe I was ever a part of it.

Everyone blamed Dugan when Anthony died, even me. Though now, I can't imagine putting that on a single person. I remember Autumn, a close friend of mine from high school calling me. She had fallen in with Dugan for quite a few years and she was pretty unrecognizable at the time. She told me Anthony died of an overdose. Anthony was younger than us. I think he was a freshman when I was a junior. He was gay I guess, everyone always just seemed to sleep with everyone in Wheeling. He was tall and thin with these big doe eyes. He was incredibly lovable. I remember there was a drag party at a friends house in high school. We all had to dress up as the opposite sex. Anthony was running around in a bustier with the bust cut out and electrical tape over his nipples in an "x". With his short hair he looked like Ann Hathaway in Les Misérables. Smeared eyeliner and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. There was a guy there hitting on underage girls and I was telling him he needed to leave. This guy was drunk and started yelling about how "he ran shit around here". Anthony came stumbling in heels with a serrated knife saying calmly in his raspy voice, "Ahem, who runs shit when they have a knife?" He told the guy to look around him at these kids who were covered in scars and piercings saying " This is what they do willingly to themselves, what do you think they'd do to you?" I've never seen someone so afraid of a boy in a dress before.

By the time I left Wheeling I hadn't seen him in awhile. Again he attached himself to Dugan, and when people got deep into that life you had to keep your distance. He was always trying to get high. It started out with huffing paint and ended up shooting oxycotin, suffocating in his sleep. His friends found him blue in the morning. He was 18, it was October 11, 2008. I don't think as a group we had ever been more devastated.  He had gotten the drugs off of Dugan and Autumn. Not that he wouldn't have killed himself anyway. The boy wanted to die probably long before I knew him. He was determined about it. But there was just something about the way it happened, and how you could tell how much Dugan had effected these people. The people who created the life he had gave him the means to end it. The people who said they were his friends, took the money out of his hands when he asked for a full script. I have no doubt now that Dugan would have stopped it if he could. In fact I can't rationally blame him for any of it, but I know how I felt being in that world after awhile. You never got anywhere. You never had anything besides these people, and you knew they would turn on you at any moment. I have this Fear and Loathing like image in my head of a car full of hyenas. All of them decked out and wearing make up, their heads thrown back and mouths wide, laughing. That is the perfect image for it. That is exactly what it is like. Scavengers, cold scavengers driving themselves to madness.

I haven't talked to Dugan in years, but I hope he has at least attempted to undo the damage he has done to himself and others. I used to call him a virus. He infects people, and if it were for anything good I'm sure he would excel. He made me really aware of how dangerous things can become so quickly. One day he's putting on your eyeliner, the next you are hiding from your parents in your dark house, fucked up, feeling like you'll never be like the people you see walking by on the sidewalk. Some people want to take you down with them. I now know that it's not a party if it happens everyday, and I remind myself of that regularly. Its truly unfortunate the evil shit that can come from people, especially out of self-hate.  I have definitely learned that I am always responsible for my own life. He has given me that. I will never be a person who destroys themselves just to prove that they can. For that, I suppose I can thank him.

Anthony: his caption read "when Im alone, all alone with a thousand downers."

Autumn

Dugan and Autumn going to an M.S.I show

BJ

Dugan

Anthony

Near the end