STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 020 // NOV 9, 2024

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA. APRIL 2018:

When I got my driver’s license my mom gave me her old Cadillac Escalade, the extended size version. Black. The thing looked like the car a president would be shot in and it drove like a school bus. Every morning before school I’d put the keys in the ignition and wake up all the birds in the neighborhood with the bark and purr of the 6.2 liter V8 engine. 403 horsepower. That’s a fuck ton of horses. I was driving home from my ex-girlfriend's house. Residential street, tree canopy, all the best of the charms of a southern city. Two cars in front of me, a shitty Toyota slams on the breaks. There’s a screech and another screech and then two loud thuds. My car hitting the car in front of me hitting the car in front of them. Mechanical impact, something you can’t plan—it’s just gotta happen. And it did. And it does. Cars are built to crash. We pull off to a side street, the three of us, and the guy at the front driving the now shittier Toyota hops out. He’s got his phone open to Google Translate. He’s saying something in a Slavic language into his phone: “No cops please no car hurts cash.” This was before the world laid itself out in arrays for me, so I said to the man, as if he could understand, “Do you have insurance?” The lady between us is calling the cops. Slavic dude is freaking out. She hangs up. He gives her four $100 bills and gives me a little smile and a slight bow. She and he both drove off. Left me standing there on the side street. It was lightly raining. There was no visible damage to the Cadillac. I licked my finger and rubbed out the little smudge of blue paint residue from the lady’s car, climbed in the Big Cat, put the key in her, and let her roar. Ha. A few years later my parents sold the Cadillac at a loss to a guy who owns a “private security company”. I checked his Facebook and he is proudly sporting multiple teardrop tats. Thank God that cat still purrs.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA. SEPTEMBER 2020:

My brother had gone to Princeton a month prior and left me the champagne Lexus hatchback my parents gave him for his not-so-sweet-sixteen. It drove like a golf cart, a far cry from my Big Black Caddy Cat. It was just new enough to have one of those keyless ignitions which made the whole ritual of starting the car way less intense. I hated that stupid fucking car. I was driving down 75 south towards home. One of the first days of junior year. Shit’s tough. School’s retarded. Just wanna play in my band. Fuck. Present tense. This dingy white Mercedes sedan, probably 2005ish, slams on the breaks. Deja vu. I press down on that break pedal as hard as I can, but the stupid golf cart granny mobile doesn’t have the teeth to actually break. So I slam the fuck into that bitch. White Mercedes vs champagne Lexus. We pull over onto the shoulder. The sun is hot. really, really hot, when I open that door. Whoosh whoosh whoosh weeewoooweewooo VIEWWWWWW. Cars are flying by. The Lexus shakes from the wind of the speeders. A lady steps out of the Mercedes blasting 21 Savage. She’s got big fake boobs and a massive ass. I’m nowhere near her car, maybe twenty feet away, but I can still smell the weed. Gross. I hate weed. She looks me up and down. I was barely seventeen, but I had a goatee and was like 180 pounds, heavy for my height, my form was weird. I’d been boxing, hitting the bag two hours a day bare-knuckled until the cement garage floor was splattered with blood. I had all these scars. I guess I still do. So, she looks me up and down and says, “Were you on your damn phone?” The answer is no. I wasn’t on my damn phone. “Well then why the hell did you hit me?” She was the one who slammed on the breaks. In all manners but legal, this was her fault. “I won’t call the cops, but I’m gonna call my man.” Maybe five minutes later a guy in the same exact white Mercedes pulls off onto the shoulder. He’s smoking a joint and a cigarette at the same time. Atlanta shit. He mumbles something to the lady and she mumbles something back. He says, “Lemme get your daddy’s number.” I give him my daddy’s number. They meet up at a Starbucks. I was too scared to show face. $1300 for nonexistent damages. Cash. Dad said the guy had a gun on his belt. I found her Facebook later that night, the lady was a stripper. She rocked. She was amazing. I still like all of her posts. When I’m rich, I’ll pay her $1300 to dance at my funeral. Haha. My mom swears she saw her doing the same thing in the same spot a few months later: slamming on the breaks, pulling over, and calling her man. Game is game.

EL PASO, TEXAS, USA. MAY 2022:

Five friends and I, all boys at the time, decided to take a road trip out west. It was a year after we graduated. Teen movie shit. Pierce’s dad said we could take his fancy red Volvo SUV. Score. We spent $200 at Costco on snacks and spent the first night sweating in our tents outside of a trailer park in Louisiana. Living the dream. We made our way to Fort Worth, Texas where Max’s cousin was gonna house us. Big suburban home. Remarkably, only one story for its massive height. All the houses in the neighborhood looked just like it. Totally identical, in fact. The American Dream, forever. We’d gotten some mediocre tacos downtown earlier that day and Daniel sent us a text in the middle of the night: “You are never going to believe this and I am so, so sorry.” He shit and threw up in the guest room bed. Max’s cousin and his wife were in the process of turning the room into a nursery for their little boy-to-be. Daniel somehow got shit and vomit on the walls, the carpet, the bed frame. Max slept through the whole thing. We set sail for El Paso that morning, the sheets in the wash and a big fat Thank You note on the kitchen counter. The cousin was out by the time it happened. He had to go to work on an oil rig. The American Dream. The drive to El Paso was awful. Endless wasteland. We loved it a lot and talked about moving out there. The closer we got to the border, the more we loved Texas. God I love Texas. No one told me there were mountains outside of El Paso. Max, notoriously bad at navigating with a GPS, alerted me to the impending exit for the campgrounds where we planned to stay on the mountain just outside of town. I pulled off the road just a little too fast and hit a curb. “1901” by Phoenix was playing when the car bounced up off the curb and slammed back down onto the dirt. I pulled the car into a clearing and we all stepped out. The red Volvo was totally fucked. Red bumper hanging off the front and covered in dirt. I screamed like crazy and begged Jack for a cigarette while Pierce called his dad. Once I stopped freaking out, Max, Jack, and Daniel hitched a ride into town while Pierce and I figured out how to get the thing towed. We called every towing company in west Texas. This one “NiNi’s Towing” agreed to “try” to tow the car. They pulled up with a pickup suited with some DIY towing attachment. Two guys stepped out saying, “Que bonita, bro. Que bonita.” He was talking about the sunset. It was the most incredible sunset, blue and gold and orange, the whole sky a wide open panoramic backdrop to my big fuck up. The towing guys looked like they were seventeen and fourteen. They vaped more than they breathed and they somehow fucked up the car even more trying to fix it into their DIY towing situation. Pierce and I called some real adult towing company and told them we left the keys on the front right tire. It was 2:00am by the time the NiNi gang gave us a ride to the Holiday Inn where the other boys had set up shop. The ride was slow and perfect, our grief melted by the mariachi pop blasting through the car radio. Four days in the Holiday Inn went by and the car sat in a Volvo dealer’s parking lot. No one was hurt and the sun set slower in El Paso. The Road Trip is over.

THREE CAR CRASHES was edited by Aaron Bauman, Jack Schaaf, and Adrian D’Agnillo.

maxwell norman’s album of the week

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World (2024)

Nothing short of a miracle that The Cure still make music in 2024, let alone that said music could be a credible sequel to Disintegration, one of the greatest albums of all time. Who could have earned this album’s magisterial power more than a band that’s been at this shit for nearly fifty years? And what a treat it is to see such power used well. Submersion into an icy swamp, buoyed by cold waves of guitar and the lilting tunes of piano. Monolithic elegies like “I Can Never Say Goodbye” alongside comparatively hard-driving bangers like “Drone:Nodrone”. Don’t get me started on “Endsong”…if only I had twenty pages to write. One of the greatest rock bands ever, still dreaming, still deafening. I feel so lucky to witness this as it happens.

get hip

This Will Save You, Stimulant’s first multimedia supplement, will be available for pre-order soon.
Party November 23rd. Stay hip.
The Vauxhalls @ Ursa on Wednesday, November 13th.
“Poetry Gallery” in SoHo. Poems from Sam Pink. And others.

THREE CAR CRASHES