A Bunkie Tease

The Bunkie Spills is a novel about two momentous days in the life of a tribe of suburban L.A. teenagers set in 1976. The story is told through the eyes of 17-year-old Bunkie, whose view of the world is as charming and skewed as the malapropisms that come out of his mouth.

The Bunkie Spills starts the way so many stories start: with a girl and a Jethro Tull concert. On the way home from the concert things start to fall apart for Bunkie and his high school sweetheart, Evelyn. Nothing has been quite right between the two of them for a while, but Bunkie realizes that there’s something more than friendship going on between Evelyn and Big Pete, the oldest member of their tribe.

Then the entire tribe does heroin for the first time.

Thus begins Bunkie’s quest to listen to his broken heart.

A few pages from the Bunkie Spills,

I had to work the lunch shift that day. Down at the Blue Windmill café. One to seven. I hated working on Saturdays on account it was always busy as hell. I thought about not going in at all but, shit, it was payday. I was going to be able to get my check and cash it and maybe if I had enough time I could make it out to the mall and pick up Evelyn’s ring.  

I was running a little early so I decided to stop by Big Pete’s house on my way to work. It was right on the way. See what he was up to. Maybe even ask him for some advice about Evelyn and this talk she wanted to have with me.

Me on my big brother’s bike. The Santa Ana winds blowing blue skies hot out of the desert, making the San Gabriel Mountains clear and crisp enough to touch. Me in my Levi cut off shorts with the frayed edges. The tee shirt I bought at the Rolling Stones concert, the white one with the giant red tongue sticking out of the mouth.

Let It Bleed.

The weight of my day pack on my back with my black slacks and my white button down shirt in it for work. Black shiny shoes, white socks, an extra pack of Marlboro reds, box. Pushing the bike’s pedals with my naked feet. The muscles of my legs turned the sprocket that drove the chain that turned another sprocket that turned the rear wheel. Rubber on asphalt, you can hardly hear it.

My big brother. His name was Emmanuel. I always thought it sounded too much like Christmas, Emmanuel, so I just always called him Manny.

When we was younger Manny told me how he was going to build a rocket ship in our backyard. Told me he was going to fly it out into the big beyond, to get away from this earth for a little while. To look down from the space. The white and blue swirls. Told me how beautiful it would be. I really believed him. Believed my big brother Manny was so smart and capable of doing something like that. I was always on the lookout for large scraps of metal and rocket engine parts to start piling up in our backyard. How I thought I was going to wake up one day and my big brother would be gone.

Years later, when I was thirteen and Manny was fourteen, we was on a campout.

The whole family. Me and my big brother and my Ma and my Pop and my little sister. Up to the Yosemite National Park. Up to see the El Capitan and the Half Dome and the waterfalls. My Mom and Pop in the tent with my sister. Me and Manny laying out under the stars zipped up in our flannel sleeping bags, sharing a Hershey bar, listening to the crickets.

“The stars are suns,” he said. “You know that. And planets, and whole solar systems,” he said. “Like ours. The Milky Way. The odds are pretty good that there must be life up there somewhere. There must be someplace where everything comes together right enough to form thinking, breathing, creatures like us humans here on earth. What do you think Emmit?”

I was keeping one eye open for the shooting stars. My other eye in a droop, wanting to dream. My mouth closed, my tongue running all over the insides, the thick of the melted chocolate against the front of my teeth.

 “But imagine there being no such place out there in those stars that could support any kind of life,” my big brother said. “That all the planets out there are dead. That our earth is the only place in the universe that life happens at all.”

“Katy Roberts, she told me she seen a UFO once,” I said.

My big brother reached over and socked me in the shoulder, not hard, but it was asock just the same.

“Emmit,” he said. “Listen to me.”

I turned over onto my side and propped my head up with my hand and my elbow. Them millions of stars in the sky throwing down their light on us. My big brother’s eyes, same dark as mine, staring out into the sky, seeing the same sky as I was. He was flat on his back, his palm between his head and his pillow, his elbow in a sticking out bony and bent.

“Pay attention Emmit,” he said. “This is important,” he said. “Chances are, you are only going to get one shot at it and if it is true that there is no life out there anywhere else, well, well you have to use this life all up as best as you can.”

“Use what all up Manny?” I said.

“Don’t you leave anything behind,” Manny said. “You hear me?”

And I suppose that part of what my brother told me, it is part of something I will always remember and now, I suppose it became a part of my middle. I wasn’t about to live any of this life unlived, no matter how long I was lucky enough to be on this earth for, and what the fuck, mostly, life was good and it was a blessing to be alive and Christ, I wanted to celebrate in it and I liked getting fucked up and laughing and fucking and drinking and expanding my perceptions about all of them ways I went around to look at the world and me and Evelyn and Big Pete and Wayne and Angelina getting to sit around and get loose and push at the boundaries about war and peace and religion and politics and music and about all the populations of this here country we live in as well as well as all them peoples that live everywhere else.

Fuck, we wasn’t doing nobody no harm. It was our bodies gods damn it. Not my Ma’s body, not my Pop’s body and it sure as hell wasn’t the Devil’s or Jesus Christ’s neither. We could do with our own temples as what we pleased. Nobody had to be the wiser because from where I was standing or sitting, I didn’t even know what the wiser was yet.