Pancakes got his name from a t-shirt he wore almost daily with a big red heart and Pancakes written in the heart. He smoked Camels and drove a Cutlass, had freckles and bad teeth. He wore a beanie everywhere, no matter the weather.
His mother knitted the beanie.
Pancakes always called me douche.
I’d knock the cherry off a joint: Nice one, douche. I’d ask for a smoke: Eat a dick, douche. I’d sympathize with his mother’s cancer diagnosis: Get fucked, douche.
A tapeworm’s mouth resembles an exploding aril, and its head resembles a hydrant. They attach to the inner wall of the small intestine and feed off a host to survive. It’s called parasitism. When I was eleven, I was terrified of becoming a host, of having a parasite alive inside me, feeding. I washed my hands so often that they cracked and bled.
Jordan flashed his balls often.
He’d dance around, balls dangling, cooing like a pigeon, and everyone would laugh. One night, he pulled them out in front of my girlfriend. The three of us were drinking in a motel room in Wisconsin.
Later, she leaned over and kissed him.
I pretended not to notice.
At some point, my fear of tapeworms gave way to drug use and addiction, and I couldn’t fear parasitic relationships if the only relationships I was forming were parasitic.
Steve had a kitten he’d get high. He’d squeeze its head between his palms and blow smoke up its nose. The kitten always fought him, once scratching Steve’s face. Steve just laughed, leaving blood to run down his neck and stain his collar.
One day, I went to Steve’s apartment, and the kitten was gone.
Steve never said to where.
The litter box remained untouched in his bathroom, overflowing with shit, until Steve got evicted a year later. Moving out, he told me to get rid of it.
All the shit was white and moldy.
I threw it in a dumpster, dry-heaving.
A tapeworm can live thirty years in the body if untreated; however, drug relationships rarely last long. They’re too combustible. A host can only hold out for so long until they’ve nothing left to offer and are discarded.
JR once chased someone down Route 31 with an axe. It would have been terrifying had he not been too twisted up to run. JR had been straight-edge until college when he lost a track scholarship for assaulting a campus police officer.
He came home and spiraled out.
The last time I saw him was in the bathroom of a bar. I walked in to find him rubbing his dick against the lip of the urinal, slack-jawed, on the nod.
He kept calling me the wrong name and asking for money.
I gave him a twenty and he left.
When I was eleven, I was terrified of tapeworms. I’m forty-three now and my hands are soft. Yet, I’ll always be a host.
— Chad Sullivan is a father, husband, and heavy equipment operator who lives and writes in Elburn, Illinois. His work will be appearing in upcoming issues of X-R-A-Y, trampset, and BAM, among others. He exists quietly, running in the woods and roughhousing with his two children.