The only time I had a chance to change a tire, I was sixteen. My dad bought me a crapped-out ’68 Mustang and I spent a couple months watching him fix it up in the garage. I gathered no knowledge, gleaned nothing. I fetched tools and brought out snacks. I held no romantic notions about cars, and was much more interested in what my friends were planning or who was winning the football game than I was in noodling around in a dusty, stifling garage with my dad. I now understand that fixing up a classic junker with one’s father is something lots of American males dream of, but at the time I didn’t understand much of anything, pinched as my mind was with hormones and rebellion and insomnia and teenage philosophy. This episode, my spectator status in the refurbishment of this Mustang, was what labeled me, in my family, as unhandy, as useless when it came to tools, mechanics, manly activities that dirtied the hands. I picked up the two friends I did drugs with and we dropped innocent-looking, gray hits of acid, quickly ate something at a burger joint before our appetites left us, and I drove us to a plain, stucco dance club called DNA, which, on certain nights, hid its liquor bottles and let sixteen-year-olds in. A few things that are exotic when you’re sixteen and it’s 1993: black light, tongue and navel and eyebrow rings, girls from other high schools, tattooed yet motherly bartendresses. We went in and receded immediately into our own minds, as trippers will, speaking now and again just to make sure we still could. We drank dozens of Cokes. Our gums felt strange. Our senses of smell grew keen. We listened to Rage Against the Machine and Blind Melon, feeling like we’d never heard these songs before, that there were endless nuances hiding in the notes. The whole world, we saw, had nuance we’d never noticed. On the way home, a thick fog enveloped us. We were taking the back roads. We were tripping balls, as they say. “Peaking.” One of my friends, Don, started telling a Stephen King story—“The Fog” or “The Mist” or something. We were driving through an area best described as “sketchy.” The place was too sparsely inhabited to be a bad neighborhood. It wasn’t rural because that requires some farming or at least big yards or cows. It was a stretch of road where you hoped not to see people because there was no good reason for people to be there, a place where you were likely to witness something you didn’t want to witness.

This, of course, is where we got our flat tire. We ran over something wooden and then drove for another two miles, the rumbling getting louder, until we were prepared to admit to ourselves that we had no choice but to pull off. We sat in the car for a time, inert with denial, in a parking lot that seemed to have dropped from the...