The Skinhead

“The Skinhead” by Newamba Flamingo

Big Jim was a skinhead. I’m not sure if he was a racist, neo-nazi type skinhead, but he was a muscular white guy with a shaved head who always wore a bomber jacket and combat boots, so, at least to me and my friends, he was a skinhead.

Big Jim used to hang around our high school and fuck this freshman stoner chick. I don't know how old Big Jim was, but he was definitely a few years older than us.

My friend Eduardo, this skinny Mexican dude, had a crush on Big Jim's stoner chick. Whenever we’d get high, he’d always tell me how he wanted to smoke a joint while she rode his dick.

Eventually he got his chance to do just that. Over this three day weekend, at a small party at my house, while my parents were away, Eduardo showed up to my doorstep, drunk and alongside the stoner chick.

We three went up to my room and the stoner chick broke out a gigantic slab of hash and we all ripped bong hits off it. Around the third cycle of the bong, Eduardo and the stoner chick ripped off their clothes and started fucking, right in front of me, on my bed.

Now I'm sure I could have joined in, as I saw her eying me as they fucked. But I knew my friend had feelings for her, so I kept at bay and continued to smoke up on her hash.

The next day, my friend showed up to my house alone and told me how the stoner chick dumped him. How she all of a sudden didn't want to see him anymore.

He was hurt. I told him to forget about it, but he couldn't.

A few weeks later, there was this morning at school when a girl's purse went missing. Security searched everyone’s lockers, but it still didn’t turn up. An hour or so later someone left an anonymous post-it note on the stoner chick's desk saying: “I know you stole the purse, bitch!”

The stoner chick broke down crying, stormed out of class, and disappeared from school.

It was around lunchtime that she returned, riding shotgun in Big Jim’s car, and they drove slowly up to the parking lot across the street from school where we'd all eat and smoke cigarettes.

Pulling into the parking lot, she pointed Eduardo out to Big Jim and Big Jim parked and got out of his clunky late model Buick and strode straight up to him.

The two of them stared each other down. It looked like they were gonna fight. Which would have been bad for my friend, because Big Jim probably would have kicked the living shit out of him. But no punches were thrown.

After some initial posturing, Big Jim just started laughing and told my friend to forget about the whole thing. They shook hands and Big Jim invited Eduardo and me to come chill with him in the woods behind the parking lot and smoke some chronic shit he had.

Eduardo and I gladly accepted his offer and ditched afternoon classes to go with him. The stoner chick even joined us, too.

Big Jim smoked us all up and we laughed and talked and listened to Bob Marley on a boombox and had a good time. I thought everything was cool.

But afterward, at Eduardo’s house that evening, Eduardo started talking about how he wanted to kill Big Jim. He called up his cousin, a member of the Latin Kings street gang, and his cousin came over and they kicked around ideas of how to kill the “puto” as we smoked PCP and drank ghetto wine.

It turned out, though, that they'd never get the chance. About a week after the stare down and subsequent bong hit session, Big Jim got into an accident. A bad one.

He'd been taking acid and him and some friends went out “train surfing,” jumping down from bridges onto the roofs of trains and riding the trains to wherever.

Well, unfortunately for Big Jim, when he leaped down from a bridge, he didn't land on top of the train. Instead, he fell in between train carriages, and his left leg got caught in the machinery and ripped off his body.

Miraculously, he survived and was in the hospital for a while. A couple girls from our school visited him there and brought him coloring books and food.

However, the stoner chick didn’t join them. She didn’t even visit him in the hospital once. She stopped talking to him immediately after she’d heard the news.

I never saw Big Jim again. He didn’t come around our school anymore after his accident.

And Eduardo and his cousin, they never mentioned him again, either.