My brother the priest liked to come up for weekends and try to save me. He would buy me lunch at the taco joint down the street and talk a long time about Jesus. But it always came back to mom and dad.

“Do you ever wonder where they went to?” he would ask me.

“Reno,” I would answer, but I always had the question wrong.

I wound up staying with this girl, a friend of a friend who went by Violet, we supported each other through our addictions, you know how it is. She was my only friend in that whole fucking city.

One day I woke up and she was gone and so was my Impala. What friends you have usually just wind up dead or so I hear.

LaLa left for the territories after everything went down. She ditched the city and put down roots and raised a family and the whole thing. I didn’t see her again until a stint in rehab at some tosh resort place and she was there for Quaaludes or some such. We laughed and hugged and kept saying, “I guess some things never change.” Then the usual empty promises about staying in touch.

I heard about her overdose last year, she got a write up in the city paper and everything. In her photo she looked just like how I remembered her. Alive.