AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Liquid war 6 windowed9/3/2023 ![]() ![]() “I had control of it until she lost control,” Hickson said. “ ‘If I don’t understand, I’ll figure it out.’ ” “I was, like, ‘Hit me,’ ” he recalled saying. Hickson said he wouldn’t he himself had started drinking heavily after his friend’s death. She confessed that she had recently relapsed with heroin, and she worried that Hickson would turn her away. As they grew close, he learned that, as a teen, in Ohio, Aytim had got hooked on opioids after a car accident, and had moved on to fentanyl before kicking the habit. They travelled on together, and Hickson started calling her his wife. “We would just lie in bed together and talk, and all of a sudden the sun would be going down.” “It got to be where we couldn’t get anything done, because we couldn’t stop looking at each other-everything disappeared,” Hickson said. They spent the next several days together. Her name was Elena Aytim, and she collected rocks, too. under a tree in Cave Junction, Oregon, when a young woman approached and introduced herself. ![]() One day when he was twenty-five, he was taking L.S.D. In time, he got two words tattooed across his knuckles: “ LIFE” on the left hand and “ LOVE” on the right. Hickson is slender, not tall, with a dusty-brown farmer’s beard and distant blue eyes-a boy’s gaze added to the visage of an older man. He would usually be hired as a stopgap worker, and, when employers saw his work, he was often asked to stay, and was sometimes put up in motels. During the winters, if he wanted, he would get a job doing manual labor someplace warm. He made money by hunting exotic minerals and rocks. He visited all forty-eight contiguous states, and, when he realized that he’d mostly seen just gas stations, he visited all forty-eight again, camping in national parks. When his friend died, everything went dark for a while. They hit the road, staying no more than three days in any one place, because Hickson wanted him to see as much of America as possible. “I saw that movie and thought, There’s a way.” He left home at eighteen with his best friend, who had terminal cancer. “As long as I can remember, I just wanted to travel, and I was told it wasn’t possible,” he said. When he was a teen-ager, he saw “ Into the Wild,” the rugged adventure movie starring Emile Hirsch. He struggled to fit in, got in some fights. He was brought up in a military family, on the gritty south side of Houston, with an I.Q. “It was a place where I could do what I wanted to do,” he told me recently. The streets on clear days had a liquid energy, and seemed to offer opportunities that he hadn’t had before. Zach Hickson arrived in San Francisco to stay three years ago, at twenty-seven, because nowhere in America seemed more appealing at the time.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |