Chapter 1 - Let There Be Rain
-November 14th, 2025-
It was November fourteenth, a day after my birthday, and it. Was. Pouring.
Not just a mild downpouring either. It was the kind of rainstorm that made it really, really stupid for me to drive on regular city streets, let alone out in the backcountry.
Technically it was only…one hour and nine minutes into the fourteenth, and to celebrate the illustrious day of my birth I ended up at not one, not two, but three various bars around Reno.
I swear to God it wasn’t my intention.
I did not leave the shelter that night thinking I was going to get as schlockered as I currently was, but you know, these things happen I guess.
It sure as hell was far from the worst decision I’ve made…well…I mean, I guess if you were to put it up to the light against the million other piss poor things I’ve done it wasn’t that awful comparatively, but it surely wasn’t smart either.
Honestly, I wasn’t even sure why I bothered to go out. It’s not like I have a million friends wishing me well or waiting in the wings to buy me some rounds. If I was honest, I have no idea how I got so hammered at the bars I wandered into. I kinda just staggered in, announced it was my birthday and there were always those people that cheered you on and bought a round.
Never failed.
If I was truthful I think I was just tired of sitting in the run-down drafty building surrounded by other bums.
I felt that reckless drive hit me out of the clear blue and I had to get up, I had to move, and do anything but sit around feeling sorry for myself.
It had been a shitty week; one of many in a series of shitty months, and shittier years behind that.
I couldn’t find a decent job and for once I was actually looking for one, especially after my last bender a month ago that had gotten me fired from Lowes. It was just crap luck that I happened to park right next to my boss Jim, also coming into work a few minutes late, and in retrospect, perhaps falling out of the driver’s side door hammered off my ass was a bad look.
Fuck it, right? Who the fuck needed Jim, or Cathy in HR, or fucking…that one dude in the hardware department who always looked at me like I was a piece of trash every time I came in. Like, one time I took his yogurt from the employee fridge and the guy just never shut up about it.
Never mind I had blown everything but two hundred dollars of my previous four paychecks getting a car, or that I was starving living in the streets, or that he was a fat sack of shit for being greedy over a single Yoplait.
Hell, he was lucky I wasn’t rifling in his fucking pockets while he watched me do it. In another life, I might have, and I might have done it at the wrong end of a switchblade with about two or three other antsy, shifty-eyed punk-asses cheering me on.
Addiction was fun like that. It made you a little wonky upstairs, and wow, but the things you did when you were desperate enough were nothing short of true madness.
But not me anymore.
Not my life. That Grey was long, long behind me…okay it was seven months behind me, but I was still doing the thing.
I hadn’t touched a baggie, snorted anything, or even touched a popper since leaving Carlton. Part of me was convinced that that was because I was still new to Reno; that I just didn’t know a dealer well enough to ask but at the same time I was trying harder to give myself credit where it was due.
I mean, it’s not like it's hard to find a street dealer. It’s not like it’s a rough gig to hit some sleazy bar and get a coke hookup after a good night out. People would throw party drugs at you if you were fun enough and if you could take a person out of reality and give them an enthusiastic enabler, or if you were offering up a good night out while they were lonely they ponied up pretty easily.
They were called party drugs for a reason, you know? You partied with them and usually not by yourself.
Once upon a time, I had been a good enough time to be that person, but now?
I sighed while I reflected as much as I could in my current state while staring out the rain-splattered massacre that was my windshield.
I dunno.
Life is hard, and I had to give myself a little pat on the back for not trying to find a connection in the North of Nevada. Shit, I still jonesed all the time though. I still knew how to spot my people...ex-people in a crowd, and every single day was like this mental mire of bullshit I avoided like a zombie virus was rolling toward me up the street.
I had to because I knew if I so much as walked into a bathroom and saw some guys hunched over a sink cutting one up I’d be on their ass begging in a heartbeat.
Fun times.
Distance was key; keeping my eyes forward was the ticket.
Any time I felt like slipping I just recalled, with forcible determination, the dragging, wasting nightmare that coming down and detoxing had been.
I made myself remember puking for three days straight while my stomach cleaved to my spine in empty agony, spinning on the floor of a softly padded white room. I would fondly recall banging the door of my locked room until my hand bled and ached from impact, screaming until my voice went hoarse for them to get me out of the goddamn room. How “I had checked myself in, and it was illegal what they were doing to me! I was a hostage, and they were all pieces of shit for daring to keep me contained” while I tried desperately to talk my way out of the box I had locked myself in.
Hell, I think I offered two clinic workers BJs if they would but let me out for ten solitary minutes so I could try to escape and run back to town for a fix.
Ah, but it was all in the past now, and tonight? Tonight I was a free little bird celebrating my twenty-first birthday.
I had made it. I was still alive, blessedly STI-free, and couldn’t help but think that I wanted to finish my night crossing the California state line to score some good bud. Not sure how I was planning on purchasing it but I was drunk and anything could happen.
I sure as shit didn’t want to spend the rest of my night and good buzz loitering around the other a-holes in the Shelter of downtrodden souls.
Don’t get me wrong. I was relieved they had a spot for me to crash. The weather was turning on this side of the Sierra Nevadas and we were a month away from the heavy snowfall that would drop feet of snow all but overnight.
Somehow the idea of huddling in my blankets in the backseat trying to wait out the blisteringly cold Winter storms all season, in the dark by some seedy park seemed like tempting fate.
With my luck, I’d end up getting my car broken into by even more homeless vagrants than myself. The last thing I needed was to be fending off toothless Robin and his band of Merry Assholes at midnight in the middle of November.
Either way, the shelter was barely better.
Lying there in my designated cot listening to the huffing and snuffling of other ragged-breathing individuals, and the bustle of motion from otherwise equally quiet, paranoid, or damaged people didn’t feel very celebratory.
I had twenty bucks left, car keys, and a quarter tank of gas to make something happen that night.
Long story short, one liquor store, a ten-dollar bottle of whiskey, and an impulsive desire to wreck my life later, here I was driving at a cool fifty on the back roads beyond Reno toward the California Stateline.
While I was driving along that fine evening, it occurred to me that I could just do this every day; just walk on into various locations and proclaim it was my birthday like a wayward Prince announcing their homecoming to the ye’ ol Kingdom at large.
As I contemplated this new wisdom, I picked up the bottle I had on hand, looking with one eye at the dark slashing torrential bullshit ahead illuminated only by two dim yellow beams of light, and shook the low contents with a frown.
No clue how that happened either.
Surely I hadn’t drunk the whole handle?
I dunno. Maybe I did.
The thought made me laugh while I tipped the rest back, swishing the contents around on my numbing tongue and feeling that bright buzz of a good night hitting me hard. Honestly, the whole evening was a blur by now. I know I talked to dozens of people tonight. I know I had socialized and gotten some of my angst out of my system.
In fact, I had only left bar three because the drinks had stopped flowing, and I had this bottle in the car waiting for me.
It was good times and good vibes, and I was feeling the call of the wild.
Ahead of me, the road was like a sinuous black river of obsidian night stretching on forever beyond my line of sight. It was lulling, almost dreamy out here in the dark wet forest landscape, nothing but the splatter of raindrops hitting in my field of headlights like opalescent scales tracing the spine of the serpent, and me?
I felt good.
I felt solid and heavy with that weighted oblivion of liquor pulling me right down into the abyss. Exactly where I liked to be at least in this mode of thought.
I rolled down the window to a blast of icy, liquid-thickened wind buffeting my eyes before I chucked the empty glass out into the dark world.
And then like a blooming nightmare, the road just turned left out of nowhere.
It was so shocking, I didn’t even see it until it was right up on me. That fast I felt the wheel slip when I cranked it to the left with instant panic singing through my hands and cursed out loud with a hearty, “Oh shit!”
In my life I have never experienced the simultaneous moment of being hammered, trying to react rapid fire while my body refused to cooperate as I did at that exact second of time.
I went for the brake and instead felt my foot hit the gas pedal like I had lead in my shoes. It was the most discombobulated moment I have ever had while my brain tried to sober up, and yet my body was locked in some stasis of equally potent shutdown.
Fuck!
It was game over.
Seconds between realization and action and I was suddenly airborne off the roadside. I felt my brain slosh in my skull with the sudden out-of-control slip and slide when the whole vehicle just whipped itself like God himself had flicked it to the side and then just kept on going up and straight over the embankment.
Two things happened in the following fastest thirty seconds of my life.
I slammed forward and hit the steering wheel so hard my vision blacked. My body slapped forward and then to the side with a whip of motion that would have shattered the side window had I not rolled the fucking thing down mere seconds beforehand.
It was a twist of serendipitous luck that was probably the only reason I didn’t crack my head on impact.
I heard the tearing crack of metal on metal screaming into the world around me like a cannon shot exploding as if I had just entered a warzone. The instant jarring ricochet of the vehicle slamming onto its side before it started some downward trajectory sent me into a spinning, violent roll that made my entire body feel like it was trying to tear itself apart.
Holy fucking Christ but the sudden snap and tightening of my seatbelt caught me with a slam that almost tore through the flesh of my neck and knocked the fucking wind from my lungs so fast I couldn’t even scream after that initial cry out to God.
After that, I can’t tell you what the hell happened.
I opened my eyes to the sound of ticking, fast, frenzied in the peripherals of my blurring consciousness.
“Holy shit.” My speech sounded muddled, almost slurred, and opening my mouth felt slow, sluggish, and all I could taste was liquor and the metallic iron of blood.
It was a first to realize I was waking up upside down, hands dangling like dead weights over my head while I struggled to right the world through a haze of confusion.
For a terrifying minute, all it was was sickly pain, the drag of gravity crushing the will to move or even fight that pull downward, and zero memory of how the hell I had gotten like this. My head was screaming, and holy shit but it felt like someone had taken a frying pan to my temple.
“Fuck.” It took that long for me to realize that I was still strapped into my seat; that the ticking was the engine radiator hissing out an emergency steam release. The smell of shorn metal shavings and iron was so strong I wasn’t sure if it was from the car alone, or some combination of that and the blood dripping in a steady line from my mouth, across my cheek, and down…up?... onto the car ceiling.
Shit, I don’t know what the hell to do.
The thought came on the heels of the sudden knowledge that I needed to get out of this car.
Visions of fire sparking assaulted me with a whole new wave of terrified concerns and you know, it really seemed like it would be typical for the trajectory of my fucking life so far.
One tentative hand on the wheel and the precarious moment compounded when the whole thing rolled loosely to one side like a pinwheel cartwheeling in the wind. I was weak in my hands, shaking badly, and looking around at the pitch-black waterlogged darkness around me, I realized I was down deep in some kind of ravine.
Shit, what the hell do I do? What the hell can I do to get out of this fucking death trap?
To make it worse, I was still shitfaced and the rolling nausea of too much liquor mixed with my position was needless-to-fucking-say, a precarious sudden nightmare in its own right.
After the longest moment of debate I have ever put myself through fueled solely by driving panic to get the hell out of this ticking time bomb, coupled with the rampant terror that I was about to drop onto my already bleeding face, I found the seat belt lock with trembling hands.
I hadn’t prayed to God for a long time but I did right then; I prayed that the belt would actually give and not lock me down tight in some metal coffin until the EMTs or cops came along.
I was not going to be fucking stuck like this until I passed out. The headrush choking around me like a threatening garrote was trying to take the consciousness from me all over again and I groaned with a real spurt of pain trying to move even that much.
Fuck my whole life. Fuck, Fuck, Jesus help me.
As I pressed that button, that frenzied mantra rapidly fired in my head. Terrified, I said a Hail Mary the whole godforsaken time.
My entire midline was shrieking in protest after slamming into that belt, and about the best I could do was throw a quick hope and prayer until the whole thing gave.
The sudden release sent me smacking into the rooftop so hard it almost snapped my damn neck on impact.
“Jesus.” For a long, long minute I lay there, feeling my body as a new entity; a vessel upon which I had failed it in every conceivable way to fail as a human on this planet.
At that exact second, the terror of being found like this, of someone coming along and reporting me to the cops, was the only reason I managed to push up with a pained groan and drag myself out of the open window.
In retrospect, I was even more lucky I had opened it to begin with. God only knows how trapped I would have been otherwise. I yanked myself free with a lot of cursing, pain wracking me from head to the soles of my feet before I managed to flip onto my ass and see the extent of the damage and how fucking lucky I was to be breathing.
Just…Thank you, Jesus.
I can honestly say that I have never sobered as swiftly and with such gravity as I did staring at that mangled Toyota Camry.
The entire front end was crumpled and torn back, the hood not just popped but fully folded back against the shattered windshield. The engine spewed out smoke in a black billowing cloud while the radiator was busy spitting and hacking up steam, and the driver’s side door was smashed in like I had gone through a guard rail or smacked into a tree on the way down.
One glance up the mountainside and I felt the color drain from my face.
Holy fucking God.
I had careened over twenty feet straight down easy, with barely an incline to slow what would have otherwise been a full-bodied smash down against the earth below. I could see the track marks from where the Camry had torn up the red soil and wrecked through the thick foliage, and it took no imagination to understand that I had just rolled down the fucking cliff.
Didn’t need to be a forensic analyst to figure that one out.
Shaken to the core, I knew two things.
For one, I needed to get out of dodge, find my cell phone first, and call and report the accident as a deer in the road kind of excuse.
For two?
I was back to where I had been seven months ago. That slapdown of reality while staring at the smoldering wreckage of my life was harsh, and I immediately felt that sinking sense of despair hit all over again.
I needed help…again—clearly that.
I wasn’t sure how often I could evade sure death at this point in the game anymore. After a certain point, it would have been really smart to assume that eventually, my nine lives would go belly up, and staring at the smoke pouring from that engine I could only imagine that this?
This had to have been strike nine on God’s tally board he was keeping on me upstairs.
I choked it all back, and through the power of fear and adrenalized liquor-inspired strength of will, climbed back up to my feet, staggered forward to the car, and had never been braver than when I flattened back down and pulled myself into the spooky confines of that crumpled auto all over again.
My phone, I was sure, had to have been thrown into Hell.
Still, I finally found it in one piece on the passenger side before squirming free, heart hammering, absolutely certain that at any second I’d see lights up above pausing on the road; that I'd hear a voice call out in inquiry, just anything at all that would solidify this moment as the pinnacling of my career as a fuck up.
It was more than enough that I felt half dead, that I knew I was a hopeless fucking loser but holy God above I didn’t need more people to know that about me.
It took a hell of a lot of willpower I wasn’t feeling to scramble up the hillside, the rain soaking me in an icy downpour while I left behind the last bit of pride I had cultivated over the past seven months smoking behind me in a ravine off Highway I-80.
I hit the pavement, ribs screaming protest the whole time, and sat heavily just off the pavement before turning my face up to the sky above. I sucked in a breath to steady my hands and tried to quiet the screaming in my head before I found the fortitude to dig out my cell phone.
It took a lot of self-talk, culling nervous terror, and determination not to get caught to finally pull the trigger and call for an Uber to pick me up. I recalled the last roadsign I remembered passing about a half a mile back, Mt. Vernon I was pretty sure.
No matter what else it was, I needed a hospital. I needed not to be found here drunk at the scene of an accident. I needed luck that I would sober up, be able to call tomorrow morning early and report it as an accident far before any passerby spotted the skidmarks and reported it ahead of me.
Fingers crossed.
I hit send, glanced back, and saw the flicker of the tail lights go off like some symbolic finalizing end of what had sure as hell just been my last hurrah.
Happy 21st birthday to me.
