Punkzilla by Adam Rapp Read Free Book Online

while like all the way through so the jagged pieces tear my neck apart but enough of that insanity right?
    Man my stomach is making crazy noises. I’m finally starting to feel like the meth is leaving my system. The last thing I ate was a cheeseburger at the Roxy for my going away party. Fat Larkin paid for it which was cool. He even put his arm around me and told me he was going to miss me. Buck Tooth Jenny showed up wearing some sort of dress that looked like a shower curtain and she hugged me like fifty times.
    Don’t worry P I don’t plan on doing any more meth because it makes your hair fall out and puts sores in your mouth. . . .
    You asked me about going AWOL so I guess I should tell you about that.
    I went AWOL on the last Friday in October which was the Friday before Parents Weekend. It was my first time and I really couldn’t risk getting caught based on how things were going for me at Buckner. I would have probably gotten kicked out and who knows WHAT the Major would have done to me then.
    Mom the Major and E were on their way down from Cincinnati and I know they were disappointed with me because the guidance counselor Master Sergeant Mastaglio called Mom and told her how I had failed a biology vocab test and blew off a pop quiz on the first fifty pages of Of Mice and Men and got two demerits at a command reveille for the shitty job I did shining my low-quarters and how my ratings in Monday drill sucked and how my cadet morale was generally shitty. As a New Boy you can get between one and five stars at Monday drill and you have to get at least three stars for three consecutive weeks to qualify for your stripes at semester. My best Monday drill rating was two stars and I only got that once. I was the last New Boy in Echo Company who hadn’t gotten three and there were twelve of us so they started calling me Dumbest of the Dozen.
    At breakfast formation this tall skinny pale racist fucker from Cicero Illinois David Voyce would yell “Dumbest of the Dozen what’s four plus four?” Voyce was my squad leader and hated me so much I think he got off on it like maybe he jerked off at night about how much he could humiliate me. There weren’t any black guys in my platoon to harass because Torris Stone was in second platoon so I became Voyce’s whipping boy. Apparently there’s this place in Cicero called Marquette Park that has all these crazy race riots. Like thousands of hockey fans get together and scream “Out with the niggers!” and stuff like that. I overheard Voyce on the Old Boy phone one day asking someone how things in the park were going. It was creepy P.
    When Voyce would ask me what four plus four was I would have to answer “Sir Cadet Dumbest of the Dozen reports that four plus four equals eight sir!” and then he would yell “Then drop and give me eight Dummy!” and I’d have to drop and snap off eight push-ups.
    And the failure only gets uglier from there because I quit the junior varsity cross-country team too. One day we had to do fartlicks which is this exercise where you run a long road of telephone poles and you have to sprint between every other pole. After the fourth fartlick I had to stop and go to a knee on the side of the road probably because I had been smoking a lot in my room and I had burned out my endurance. The junior varsity coach stood over me and jogged in place while screaming at the top of his lungs that I had a vagina. “Vadge!” he screamed “Nothing but vadge!” and then he ran off and joined the others. I was tempted to go AWOL right then and there no shit P but I had nothing but a pair of shorts and my cross-country T-shirt and my running shoes so I turned around and headed back to campus. What’s weird is I still have the running shoes. In fact they’re the only pair of shoes I own. They’re New Balance and they’re so beat-up I had to fix one of the bottoms with Elmer’s glue and duct tape.
    I wound up getting three hours of Guard Path for not reporting