March 4, 2008
- We begin with Jamie riding a Greyhound bus from Portland to Tennessee and writing a letter to his brother, P.
- Things have been a little crazy in Portland, which is why it's taken Jamie so long to respond to P's letter.
- Jamie's been living in a sketchy boardinghouse/long-term hotel joint called Washington House, where his roommate was his friend Branson; they did meth together last night.
- Now he's cold and shivering and hungry, but the bus driver—a creepy guy wearing a plastic compression mask because he has some kind of facial infection—says they're not stopping until Idaho.
- The other folks on the bus are sketchy, and Jamie wishes he had the iPod Fat Larkin gave him, but he gave it to Branson.
- Jamie stole at least fifty iPods for Fat Larkin, who paid him twenty bucks every time he knocked out a jogger and swiped their MP3 player. It was pretty nice of Fat Larkin to let him keep one, huh?
- The weird thing is that Jamie doesn't feel guilty about it, even though he bashed the people in the head with a heavy alarm clock to knock them out. He wonders if he had a fever as a baby that destroyed his conscience.
- The iPod Fat Larkin let him keep had a bunch of good punk rock on it, which Jamie loved. Fat Larkin started calling him Punkzilla, and then all his other Portland buddies started calling him that, too.
- The other way Jamie and Branson made money was by taking up a fake collection for a kidnapped girl named April Yon. (The girl was real, but they didn't give her family the cash.)
- Jamie knows his parents back in Cincinnati would be really upset if they knew what he was up to. His mom's already upset because he went AWOL from Buckner, the military school in Missouri where they sent him after he stole a DVD player from Service Merchandise.
- He tells P about Branson's girlfriend, Buck Tooth Jenny, another Washington House resident, whom he occasionally paid for a hand job when business was good. Branson was okay with it.
- Buck Tooth Jenny's twenty-four, ten years older than Jamie, and her room was a little weird. She had shelves of baby doll heads, and she gave them names and called them her special friends. She also left Oreos beside the heads in case they got hungry.
- Jamie spent Christmas Eve with Branson and Buck Tooth Jenny, and though it was depressing, it wasn't as depressing as Christmases back home—Jamie had to get stoned on Actifed just to survive those.
- His mom is super unhappy because she's married to their dad, a retired military dude Jamie and P call the Major. He's a homophobic jerk who made P go spend the night in a hotel when P came out as gay. He likes their brother, Edward, though, because Edward does everything right.
- On Christmas morning at Washington House, a woman named Black Betty set her fifth-floor room on fire when she fell asleep smoking. She died, and Jamie saw the paramedics carry her body out on a stretcher, but fortunately everyone else was okay.
- Whenever Jamie closes his eyes, he can still see her charred face.