AT THE END OF THE WORLD

That Southern Charm™

OKAY, SO I LIED. My End of the World started much, much, much earlier. This shitshow started on March 20th, 2020. The day I met Casey Kelly. I should've known, when I'd met him, checking out our slumlord's Craigslist ad for an apartment, that any omen on the day Brady bailed on the Patriots... would be a bad omen.

Casey Kelly moved into Spring in March, in the height of the COVID pandemic in NYC, in the midst of masses buying bulk hand sanitizer and TP, if you can believe that that actually happened. (It did.)

It was odd, disjointed, I vaguely remember—a confusing shift to classes on Zoom. I could show up pantsless. Yoona, chain-smoking behind me, off-screen, listening in on my Ethics class discussions, jotting down pieces of English to study. Fuck, I smoked a joint as I graduated (virtually) in May. Oh, so virtually, baked beside Sarah and Casey. Things kept moving, even if I was at a standstill. Graduation at the Radio City Music Hall. Demoted to a hastily planned Commencement in Club Penguin, cancelled when Disney shut it down the day before our scheduled ceremony, due to being a non-moderated clone that had gained impressive traffic during lockdown, rife with hate speech and sexual deviance, where users were found advertising "stripper igloos" and "penguin e-sex."

Woot. Class of 2020.

Some shit, you just can't make up, I swear.

But, no, I thought Casey was just... another strange variable in a strange era in a strange world, you know, where Tom Brady isn't a Patriot and half of the country is preparing for the Spanish Influenza. Meh. I'd stopped overthinking things months ago.

It was only a month or so after, I'd been smoking a cigarette in front of a bodega with him, when Casey Kelly had a seizure. Convulsions. Unconsciousness. He dropped to the gravel, and I was terrified to call 911. I didn't. Somebody else did. Paramedics asked him questions, and when he came to, Casey couldn't answer, couldn't tell them who I was, didn't know who I was, or if I was even there, looking through me with big, black, empty eyes.

It was a mix of shit, I know. Coke. Some experimental drug from Sweden. Codeine. Oxy. Xanax. Withdrawals. Casey had robo-tripped his way into Spring, and I already knew, but I didn't know. It was a grand mal seizure, similar to what I'd seen my brother go through when I was younger. It doesn't matter how many times you see it.

He could've died. He knew.

From what I understood, Case got everything that had been confiscated back when they released him. Took an Uber from the hospital a half hour later, rolling in to ask what had happened. I don't remember much, he told me, and I figured our conversation about the fate of the NFL preseason was lost forever.

From there, it was history. I never knew if our conversations were being funneled into a void. His random stories of New Orleans, the Bayou, Hurricane Katrina. His wild stories of steak knife hits, or fucking his dad's girlfriend, or his girlfriend's mom, or jumping some poor motherfucker to steal his shoes in Dallas, or backpacking in Vietnam, living in Kuwait, or smoking his first cigarette after being released from prison, or how amazing heroin felt, or how it had seemed like a good idea to make cocaine pancakes. Half of it you don't know if you believe. What did you learn today? I'd ask, as if Yoona still lived with us. Oh, Casey would say, I learned hipsters in Williamsburg will pay a lot for drugs. Trust Fund Kids, you know, shelling their parent's money out for some shit cocaine.

He'd found his nook in New York City. Been chased out of a park in Queens by two Latinos with knives, he told me, and resorted to hanging around sketchy bars in Bushwick, lingering outside warehouses in Chelsea, or lurking in the Marcy Projects. It worked for him. His clientele ranged, across the boroughs, and resulted in a lot of late-night drops. I didn't sleep much, so I always caught him leaving the apartment at two, three, four in the morning to deliver bars throughout Brooklyn or Manhattan. Press-30s, probably. The Pill Game.