from “Methamphetamine for Dummies”

Coombs grew up four houses down from me. A runty high-school dropout with tousled blond hair and a sharp Adam’s apple, he has, I believe, some sort of undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome, but he’s too poor, simple, and uncaring to do anything about it. (Until the last twenty out of a million years of our human history, our “neurological disorders” were simply our personalities.) Coombs is inclined to violence and has a variety of tics. He claps, hops, and hoots. He screeches, coughs, barks, spits, grunts, gurgles, clacks, hisses, whistles, whoops, give you the finger, wants to arm-wrestle you (he’s very strong), and finishes your sentences in a ghostly mumble that makes it seem for a moment as if he is reading your mind. I remember him in his baby carriage. I remember him catching me on the way to school one morning and showing me an Irish setter that had hung itself by jumping, still hooked to its leash, over a brick wall. Here he is at ten years old drinking from a bottle of Ten High bourbon on the couch in a ramshackle gas-and-chicken smelling house piled high with furniture and trash, his mother in her muumuu glued to the TV. As I recall, he began smoking pot in second grade. Marijuana ameliorates his symptoms, turns his jerking and swearing into squirming, giggling, blank stares, and occasionally pithy observations such as “Why do people have hair?”