Short Stories


MY FRIEND DANNY by Xavier Toby


At high school I was fat and awkward while Danny was skinny and didn’t understand that some people were more important than others. We were picked on from the beginning and became friends because by sharing the rejection, we were able to cope.

Now we’re nearly thirty and still friends. He gives me drugs for free. That’s not the only reason we’re friends but without them, I wouldn’t make the effort.

When I’m high I promise to pay him, but later he never asks. We often plan to hang out during the day, without the drugs, but that never happens. Maybe we’re terrified it won’t be any fun.

We went to a private school where the rich kids had established their friends’ years earlier. Like a toddler who is able to slow pluck the feathers from a wounded bird, because they don’t understand it’s in terrible pain, the rich kids might have never considered that we’d be scarred for years. Or maybe they did and just didn’t care.

I’ll probably meet up with Danny later tonight. I know where he’ll be and while I hate the place, the free drugs won’t be anywhere else. The first time I met him there I had to call in from outside, because I didn’t have a girl on my arm. He walked me in without glancing at the bouncers, explaining that they also needed help to stay up all night.

Danny and I always arrived at school first so we could have the classroom to ourselves. We’d throw chairs across the room and kick over desks until we were breathless, then straighten up the mess before anyone else arrived. Whenever a chair or desk was broken nobody ever investigated; it was just left in the corridor and replaced overnight.

Danny will be sitting in the corner when I get there, while the pricks from high school will be waiting at the bar for their turn to see him. First I’ll go over to Danny and he’ll tip some speed into my drink and slip me a pill, then I’ll chat with the guys from school until he’s finished. I don’t mind; they have to be nice because of my connection to Danny, and once the serotonin fuelled fireworks display starts in my head, high school is reduced to an insignificant, vague memory.

After meeting Danny, they march straight out the door to some invite-only party, product launch, bar opening, whatever.

One morning Danny turned the crucifix on the back wall of the classroom upside down. Three days later our homeroom teacher saw it and went nuts. He privately interviewed every student. Some of the popular kids tried to help by admitting that they had noticed it days earlier, and got detention because they hadn’t said something immediately. Danny and I thought that was hilarious.

We hated them and their holiday homes, four-wheel drives and parents with smug sounding, impossible to explain jobs like ‘developer’, ‘importer’ or ‘investor’. Parents they only ever saw when they went to the snow in winter and overseas in summer. We hated them because unless they were tormenting us, they ignored us.

Danny and I had parents with real jobs like ‘builder’, ‘engineer’ and ‘teacher’. We still lived in large homes but further from the city and spent holidays at rented apartments by the beach.

Once he’s finished we’ll skip between clubs and I’ll hardly speak to him; he’ll be too busy dealing, or chatting with the club’s regulars that surround him like a desperate, pathetic shadow. It pisses me off that he’s so polite to them but he probably likes the attention. Throughout the night he hands me the drugs almost like an apology.

After he’s done the rounds we’ll settle somewhere with a pool table and play for hours. We stay out so long, so often, that as a pair it’s rare for us to be kicked off a table. The drugs sharpen my focus, making the angles clear and the soft chink as each ball drops is the most perfect sound I’ve ever heard.

At the beginning of year ten I laughed with the rich kids at jokes about Danny’s lack of common sense, then helped convince him that the next Monday was a plain-clothes day. He carried around the same bewildered-hurt look all that day. He never asked why I did it and I never apologised, but I’ve never done anything like that to him since.

Danny left school early to do an apprenticeship as a landscape gardener. Two years later, a couple of weeks before we finished, he came back, unscrewed the ducted air-conditioning grills and put fish guts behind each vent.

I was the only person he told, and I could never work out if I was angry or impressed. I had to put up with the smell but enjoyed watching everyone else trying to figure out what was causing the stench. For his sake, I pretended to be impressed.

The principal knew it was a muck-up day prank and told us he knew who was responsible. They should come forward, he said, otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting their exams. When I told Danny, he couldn’t stop laughing.

While waiting for Danny at the bar, I’ve discovered that the guys from school all work for their parents, are married or planning on it, and sell or own four-wheel-drives. That’s all they talk about, apart from sport. Those who made it through university have jobs in PR, advertising or marketing. I tell Danny that they are nothing but less successful versions of their parents because they’ve been spoon-fed life. He smiles and I’m proud of the insight.

After school I went to university, Danny kept working and on weekends we would loiter around girls at nightclubs too scared to talk to them, still convinced we were worthless. After we left the clubs we would roam rich suburbs, wrecking letterboxes and gardens.

He introduced me to weed. We got so stoned we threw up, freaked out, laughed like it was fun and then smoked some more.

He was first to get a car, a classic six-cylinder sedan that had been modified and thrashed by a series of rev-head owners. In the back streets of an outer suburb I was in the passenger seat while he attempted burnouts, when the car suddenly gripped the road and leapt into a telephone pole. Together we pushed it into a ditch and that night he reported it stolen. He didn’t care because it was insured and I didn’t care because it wasn’t my car and was just glad I wasn’t dead.

Occasionally the girls that hang around Danny chat to me, probably to get closer to him, maybe because they like me. It makes no difference, I’m always so wasted I become so caught up in whatever crap they’re talking and forget to try anything.

He was the first to have a girlfriend. After he started his own landscaping business she came to work for him, then he bought a house in an acceptable suburb with a large backyard and an above ground pool. They got engaged.

Sometimes one of the straights, alcoholics now they’ve given up the drugs, will ramble on to us about long-term effects. I whisper to Danny that they’re easy to pick because they’re never smiling and always slurring. He laughs. If they become too annoying he gets them thrown out.

What the guys from high school remember as pranks and jokes, I remember as torture. Whenever they reminisce the fireworks stop and I become a tiny speck, paralysed in an expanse of nothing, smiling like an idiot until they leave.

Danny grew a lot of weed in that big backyard and made terrific homebrew. His fiancée went nuts and kicked him out. He sold the house and moved on to dealing class A’s.

I missed all this. Soon after he bought the house I moved interstate to get away from my girlfriend. We kept breaking up then getting back together and it had become really annoying for everyone.

I returned a few years later and immediately called Danny. He was now part time landscaping and full time dealing. Even though we hadn’t stayed in touch, we still we stayed out for three days drinking, taking drugs and having intense chats; mostly about how much we still hated those rich, arrogant kids from high school.

Out the front of my parent’s house we smoked crack to straighten out after too many pills, then he gave me a packet of speed to see me through dinner. Whenever I started to drift off, I locked myself in the bathroom, licked my finger and dipped it into the bag for a quick buzz, until I lost the bag sometime after dessert. I was terrified for weeks that my parents would find it. Nobody ever said anything though.

After high school I had invited Danny out with my university friends a few times. He always treated everyone equally, which was a problem. Someone would steal a beer, cheat at pool or tip a drink over someone and Danny would stand up for the victim. I respected his sense of fairness, but it was annoying that he was so clueless. A fight would start because only the popular people caused trouble and he’d be standing there, with that same bewildered look, until I saved him.

Coming down on Sunday afternoons, arms shaking and heart pounding, I remember the warnings of the straights and am convinced I’m about to die. Then I reflect on my life and don’t care. Thanks to high school I spent years believing I wasn’t good enough so I never tried and now I’m stuck in a career I can’t stand and it’s too late. I’m addicted to the wage, bonuses and monthly pat on the back for making my sales targets.

I settled for what was easy and every weekend, instead of doing something about it, I mask the fact that it’s meaningless and drown my dissatisfaction by shoving as many drugs as possible up my nose and down my throat.

Tonight, sometime after my third pill, I’ll decide that I have an amazing connection with a stranger and although I’ll claim it’s not the drugs, it always is; and I’ll rant at this stranger for hours about how I’m going to change my life.

But next week will be more of the same. After having wrung all the positive chemicals out of my body over the weekend, I’ll waste the first couple of days depressed and short-tempered, the nights unable to sleep. Then I’ll be a zombie until Friday, when all I’ll be able to think about is meeting up with Danny.

So I meet up with Danny, like I always knew I would, he deals to the high school guys, we play a game of pool, and then we leave. Before going into the next place we snort crushed up pills off the dashboard of his car, and Danny tells me that last weekend he went to our ten-year reunion. He recites news of who died, who had kids and who is fat. I try to listen but after ten minutes decide I don’t care.

I interrupt and tell him that they are arrogant, vacuous leeches, who exist only to pass on the family name through their manicure addicted, coconut coloured wives, and are simply waiting for their parents to croak so they can inherent the family fortune, quit their jobs and travel the world. Proud of my outburst, I look to Danny for a smile of approval, but he’s wearing that bewildered look.

Maybe he only cares because he thinks he should, as they’re his best customers. I want to leave but instead I quickly change the subject. I won’t be able to deal with tomorrow without Danny’s help and it’s easier to get wasted and talk about what I’d prefer to be doing with my life, rather than being alone and actually having to do it.

After seeing the same guys every weekend for months they no longer leave after doing their deals. People on drugs don’t have conversations, they just wait for their turn to talk and these rich kids aren’t any different. Instead of starting my own monologue however, when they pause, I comment on theirs.

Ideas jump between us like sparks and right now it’s the most amazing conversation they’ve ever had because it’s all about their favourite topic - themselves. They slip me drugs to keep me from wandering away and soon enough I’m so off my head I don’t mind their inane chat and I know, whatever they say about the past, they can’t touch me.

These days they invite Danny and me to their parties, and I have since discovered we’ve got more in common than I ever realised. Through their contacts I get an amazing advertising job and now I can afford my own drugs. To be honest, we probably took the teasing at high school way too seriously.

By Xavier Toby, Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.




Short Stories