This time of the year, not only am I reminded of my mom’s death, but also of my childhood friend. She shot herself in the head. On January 2nd 2000.
C. and I met in 6th grade. I was new to this small town up in the laurentians, coming from Montreal. My mom send me to live with my dad because she wanted to… well, I don’t know what she wanted but she ended up dancing topless and feeding her coke habit. Anyways. So I’m sent to live with my father and his girlfriend. It was really hard the first few weeks. I didn’t know anyone, and everybody knew each other. I started to hang out with a weird family that lived next to the school, smoking and stealing and stuff. Then one day one of the girls I was “friends” with confronted me with my friend to be. Saying I had badmouthed her. Which was true, but I wasn’t gonna admit to it. So C. jumped on me and started to beat the shit out of me. I had never been in a fight and had no clue what to do.
I was on my back, C. straddling me, punching me in the face when an old man got out of his car and started to yell at C. to get off me, leave me alone. So I did what I thought was the safest thing to do… I told the old guy to get the fuck back in his car, this was none of his business… And a friendship was born.
She was living with her mom, who was a sometimes dancer, mostly waitress and barmaid. Into drugs of course. I celebrated my 12th birthday smoking a joint with C., her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. We were best friends, I basically lived at her place.
Throughout the years, we took a lot of drugs, fucked a lot of boys and beat up a lot of people. But then I moved back to Montreal and it wasn’t the same anymore. We grew apart. She really went all out and also became a dancer… then dealer… then escort… then she had a kid… then she got AIDS… then she hooked up with a loser who beat her up… who left a fucking gun in the house… which she used to kill herself.
She was an accident waiting to happen. She was miserable. She loved her daughter to death. She was my friend.