[15 April, 2023]

“How are you doing lately?” I ask Jeffrey, a little concerned. We are standing next to a small campervan, in which he lives with his mother, stepfather, and 14 yapping dogs. We’re surrounded by a vast area of nothing called Nevada. While Jeffrey is shooting at old microwaves with a pistol, he tells me how he, together with Kodie, his best and only friend, who also lives on this terrain, burnt down six cars and a trailer by accident, when they were lighting campfires. “We dumped it out, [thinking] it was out, and it kind of sparked everything up,” he smirks. The burnt car carcasses are now being used as a breeding ground by the peacocks that took over and roam freely here.

“I was having issues with one of my exes and I told her: I'm going to go get my car... And I crashed it and I launched it.” When the police arrived, they found a weapon and drugs in the car, which resulted in revoking his driving license (that he didn’t even have) and the possibility of jail time. Jeffrey is looking at me with a gaze that’s somewhere between boyish rebellion and manly shame. “Depression and drugs don’t mix.” Again silence. And then with a little bit more excitement: “But you live and learn, right?”

I got to know Jeffrey about four years ago, as a curious, bright youngster with an enormous head of hair that danced just as frivolously in the wind as he danced through life. He wanted to become a farmer and live off the land. He and Kodie spent most of the day fishing, motocrossing, and hunting bobcats. The two boys lived without boundaries or rules in their own paradise. They played cowboys with real bullets, and nobody said a word.

Now, adult life seems to be harder than he thought it would be. His mischievous smile appears now and then, but is often overruled by a gnawing sense of loneliness. His appearance has also changed. He has grown, and has become stronger. His hair is tied tightly together (for the photograph he briefly unties his hair), and he has marked his body with scars of shapes and words “as a kind of tattoo.”

“Do you feel this is the right place for you to be?” With all my heart, I hope for a yes, for reasons I don’t dare to say out loud. “Yes, here I can be whoever I want to be. Nobody intervenes with me.” Then I ask him the question that has been on my mind all day, and of which I already know the answer. “Do you trust yourself with a gun?”

“Not really, no. If I get angry I might use that gun in a way that I shouldn’t. I know that for a fact.”