Just Beneath My Skin Read Online Free PDF

doesn’t say nothing. Charlie pops one tab and Johnny pops the last two. Then he leans back in his chair and squints at me. I feel uncomfortable, but there is nothing I can do. I’ll never get out of here if I take that stuff and, besides, I never really liked it. I feel too out-of-control on acid. I remember one time freaking out on it and running into the woods behind Johnny’s house in the middle of the night. I stayed in there five hours and hallucinated all kinds of crazy shit. I saw an old hag dressed in rags with long stringy grey hair scramble up a tree and look down and cackle at me. I saw a deer with eyes as big as saucers. I found a place to curl up and close my eyes and wait for the acid to wear off. I came out at dawn to find Johnny and Charlie and a bunch of others sitting up in Johnny’s house still tripping. They took one look at me, with pine needles stuck to my clothes and in my hair, and started laughing their asses off.
    Johnny don’t look none too happy, but he doesn’t force me to do the acid. Charlie’s chin drops to his chest as he sits there mumbling to himself. He isn’t asleep, just so drunk he can’t hold his head up. Charlie gets this way at a certain point in the day, though at any moment he can snap out of it and start talking and drinking like he was before. Johnny seems to get more comfortable in his chair and is staring off at the wall at a point just above my head. We sit that way for what seems like close to a half hour with nobody saying nothing. The clock above the sink says it’s five o’clock. I tell Johnny I have to go.
    His eyes slide down from whatever he is staring at to crawl across my face. “Sure, man,” he says. “Just hold on second.”
    I can tell the acid is working in Johnny when he has trouble getting out of his chair. It isn’t the kind of trouble you have when you’re drunk. It’s like he thinks the chair is gonna float away on him if he isn’t careful. He gets out of it gingerly, and says, “I’ll be right back.”
    He disappears into the bedroom.
    I think about splitting right then. I might make it to the car before Johnny wises up, and he doesn’t have any wheels to follow me. I’d have to be careful whenever I came back into North River but at least I’d be free of him.
    In the end, I don’t have the guts to move outta my chair.

MY MIDDLE NAME IS ALEXANDER . Mom says Jake gave it to me. He wanted it to be my first name, “after some dumb Greek he read about somewhere,” but Mom wouldn’t let him. “Alexander’s too damn long,” she said, “and Alex is a girl’s name.” Mom told me this once when she was in a good mood, when she forgot, I guess, Jake wasn’t supposed to be my father.
    â€œHe was just around at the time,” she said when she caught herself. “I let him help with the naming.”
    When Mom told me this last year I looked up the dumb Greek in an encyclopedia at school. The only Greek guy in there was Alexander the Great and it turns out he wasn’t really Greek at all but from a place called Macedonia that the Greeks didn’t like because they thought everyone who lived there was stupid, kind of like the way Nova Scotians feel about people from Newfoundland. I wondered at the time if the Greeks made up Macedonian jokes, like how many Macedonians did it take to screw in a light bulb, until I remembered light bulbs weren’t invented then. We learned all about Thomas Edison that year in school. His father was from Nova Scotia, but I was sure I remembered he was from New York. I didn’t know how close New York was to Macedonia but I had no one to ask. Mom would get mad if I asked her, and Jake was off in the woods that winter cutting trees with a crew. It was still neat knowing Jake gave me that name.
    It said in the book that Alexander the Great beat up almost all of the world and took it all