I Could've Been There

The night began like most of the nights usually did. With a quick match to a cigarette and a swig out of a brown glass bottle of liquor, the prototypical night in Philadelphia began.
Elvis, a small brained punk rocker who had sniffed way too much model airplane glue leaned himself up against a wall in the vacant floors of the construction site. He was the reason I was there. He was the reason we were all there. On this night, it hadn’t been my idea to evade the restricted and incomplete space. It seemed like a great idea but was never anything I could have fathomed. We drank amongst nail guns, blasting caps, and sheets of heavy dry wall. When I first heard the pop I thought nothing of it. The screams that came afterward were what I seem to remember the most. Searing, blood curdling screams came from the floor below.
When I heard the scream, I wasn’t sure how to react. Shannon, a tall Asian girl with a foot high Mohawk and a thirst for Mickey’s and Oi! Punk sat over in a corner, already comatose dribbling about the noise level. She claimed she heard cries and heard a loud pop, but couldn’t determine where it had come from.
Mark was a Ukrainian immigrant who wore an old studded jacket of mine. I used to see him at shows flaunting my jacket as he picked up endless girls. It has still bothered me to this day how frequently mark got some action. I used to see him talking to girls and pointing to his jacket. He used to say
“ Hey babe, this is all mine.”
God I hated him. He interpreted this event much differently. He usually got belligerently drunk and broke things. Tonight, he had chosen to crush every sheet of drywall that lay in his path. With his head, he single handedly broke more then twenty sheets in half. The method he chose to use involved him simply slamming the sheet upon his head which was usually followed by a storm of white and cream colored bits of limestone that caught into his spiked up hair. Mark’s reaction was nothing. He was too fucked up to even figure out what had happened.
Following the screams, I went downstairs to find another member of the crew lying on the unfinished concrete floors. Alex, a buck toothed hardcore kid who dressed in simple punk attire that included nothing more than a T- Shirt, had wrapped a piece of housing paper, the Tyvek stuff they usually put on the outside of new houses, around his bleeding hand. Sources around him told me he had discovered the nail gun with excitement and passion. I looked around next to him and he was alone. Throughout the rest of the vacant building our circle of friends laid out of commission like some sort of drunk fallout. The explosion had been the nail gun incident, and the fallout were the still bodies of my friends that lay upon each other in other various rooms. Upstairs, Ethan lay passed out in a bathtub in a unfinished bathroom. A paperclip with hash residue lay beside him and his pants were down revealing his flaccid penis still holding on desperately to a condom.
That night many things may have occurred in the building. Shannon could’ve fucked some lucky fellow in the strangest place you could imagine. She once told me she had sex with a friend of mine in the sewers. Mark could’ve, well, been mark. The usual passed out womanizer. Alex likewise, could have found the nail gun, thought it was a pistol and tucked it into his pants. I could have not been there that night, but I was. And that was the truth.