How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  Then I checked my account. The new charges hadn’t cleared. The tab was open, but I could’ve gotten all of Pawtucket drunk in a bar like that. I read more names on the wall until they started to blend together.

  The names were splattered so thick it started to look like tie-dye. Dub didn’t know his pops’ name. His mom refused to tell him. I wanted to leave my pops’ name on the wall, maybe just #90, his jersey number. The way most folks remembered him.

  My pops was immortalized at his alma mater. The Morris Trophy for Pac-10 defensive player of the year is made of glass. My mom used it as a doorstop for my room. Her house is old and lopsided and the doors don’t shut well or stay open. She learned football just to communicate with him. She used to smoke French cigarettes and wear a hijab, more concerned with mountain views and social activism than blitzes up the B-gap.

  THE MULTICOLORED CHRISTMAS lights made the bar warm, shut off from the rest of the city. The woman in the maroon dress and the boy were now strutting to some flighty James Brown—“Get On the Good Foot.” Dub was animated, talking to Rolls. My boys were laughing. I bought another round, this time for everyone in the place. A few folks lifted their drinks but most went on without notice. I sat back in the booth and we finished the bag. Rolls didn’t do any, but he didn’t screw his face up either. I was with my boys and there was possibility ahead of us, not behind.

  I bought a third round. Rolls was slumped, and Dub told me to chill. He said to think about tomorrow. Blake got up and went to the bathroom.

  “An hour ago you were asking me to drop a grand on some bitches who didn’t even know your ass,” I said to Dub. My speech felt thick and it must’ve cut deeper than I thought.

  Dub’s gaze looked far away, like his eyes were fumbling around the world blindly. I pushed him in the booth, somewhere between playful and hard. His eyes livened a bit.

  Rolls woke up from his weed-head slumber. “Let’s go get some food,” he said.

  Blake came back from the bar and handed me my card.

  “I signed for you,” he said.

  “Fuck you too,” I yelled. I stood up.

  “Sit your soft ass back down.” Dub grabbed my arm to pull me back and I shoved him again. He grabbed both my arms so I was trapped in the booth. I yanked my weight back to stand but couldn’t because he had leverage. He laughed.

  The bartender saw and told us to quit fucking around. I stood up slow, straightened my shirt, and looked down on my table of friends. I wanted to knock Dub’s teeth out.

  WHEN MOM AND I walked through the Husky Hall of Fame in the days after Pops’ funeral, she didn’t talk about nursing Pops back to health after rough games. She just kept yelling “U Dub!” like she was back in college, smiling about the positive. She talked about the burger joint, Dick’s, that her and Pops used to go to and how they used to sneak tequila into the old Husky stadium by packing it into my pops’ roommate’s bag—he was in a wheelchair from a diving accident so no one checked him. Mom held my hand as we walked the bleachers like I was a kid again, pointing out to Lake Washington as the spring sun set, turning the lake into a postcard. She pointed out the Cascades to the east. She never talked about his football accolades except to say that she wished I’d seen him play. At the funeral, his hall-of-fame coaches forgot his name. They called him Lane.

  BLAKE AND ROLLS dragged us to some benches near the High Line. Dub hopped around, and I felt low. I texted Rebecca. What’s good? I wished I’d said something witty. I wished we spoke the same language. Rolls kept saying I needed to throw up and I told him to shut the fuck up. He and Blake sat Dub and me down on different benches. I stared at Dub over my right shoulder and imagined caving his eye in. Blake ignored us and called his old girl a few times. He wanted pussy. We were all too fucked up to be good to our people.

  Rolls started pacing behind the benches and mumbling to himself about green space in cities. Everyone tuned him out.

  “Get higher,” I told him.

  “I’m sober,” Rolls said.

  Dub and I looked at each other.

  “You louder than the Fourth of July, nigga,” Dub said.

  Dub and I almost smiled at each other.

  “You’re so high, you’d pipe a vending machine,” I said.

  Dub laughed a little. “Nigga, you blaze so much, your connect thinks you need an intervention.”

  Blake hung up his phone. “Lauren’s on the way,” he said. He looked up from his screen. “And you smoke so much, your emergency contact is Domino’s, nigga.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You smoke so much, niggas think you Cherokee.”

  “Nah, nah,” Blake said. “You hotbox the car so often, the pope gets scared when you open the windows.”

  Dub didn’t laugh. I tried not to—that was the kind of intellectual shit that made me suspect in high school. Dub and I stared at each other again. Blake tried to make some joke or explain it, but the traffic rolled past, hissing like an expensive sleep track. Then the street sounds eased for a minute and the night fell silent. Dub slumped off the bench, so drunk that he could only be swimming in his mind, nowhere else.

  “Your mom traded you for goodwill,” I said.

  Dub sat up from his slump, glared at me. Rolls shook his head.

  “Your mom was a fucking side chick,” Dub said. He tried to make a move, but he was stumbling drunk and Blake held him down with both hands.

  I thought about my pops’ other women and about my sister. I spat at Dub but it didn’t reach him on the other bench.

  “Cool out,” Rolls said.

  “How’s Tayla?” I said. I didn't give a fuck—I’d sink us both. “Yeah, nigga, I know your character.”

  Rolls opened his mouth, but he was still reeling from the stray shot and no words came out.

  Dub wasn’t finished. “Your pops was a bridesmaid,” he said, and I wanted to push his fish eyes through the back of his skull. Wanted him to lose everything he had. I tried to shake my head clear of liquor. I couldn’t.

  “Ayo, what’s your pops’ name again?” I asked, real calm-like.

  Rolls stepped away from me. Dub’d only told us what little he knew about his pops when he was dead drunk, back in high school, those nights Rolls and I funded the parties he threw at his house.

  Blake studied us, trying to figure out what’d been said.

  Dub was silent.

  “What was that?” I said, cupping a hand to my ear. “Your pops could kick you in the fucking head and you wouldn’t even know. He dropped you off like an order of lo mein.”

  Dub was tongue-tied. I couldn’t remember another time. Rolls just shook his head like his well of wisdom had gone dry. Blake didn’t look at me.

  I got up and started walking underneath the High Line, headed north. I went to check the account but stopped. Even after the bill for the drinks cleared, that’d be a whole lot of something, or nothing.

  There was a lot I’d never know about Pops—what lines he laid on women, how he and my mom came to share something. I let my memories of him run on loop, playing together to re-create him. He took me to see a horror movie when I was twelve. He’d brought a bag of Jack in the Box egg rolls into the theater. Freddy Krueger kept killing bad actors and I watched Pops suck those things down. He caught me watching and offered me the bag. He yelled some shit at the movie screen with his mouth half full and I took a bite of one and we both laughed and stayed laughing. His laugh was a hoarse, full-bodied affair. It was like watching the earth tremor. Yeah, I could hold on to that.

  The world is fully lit and I can still smell the liquor on my stepmom. Dee’s eyes are hidden from the summer sun behind some dark-ass shades and her voice is two octaves below tires on gravel, even lower than usual. I laugh to myself ’cause I know when we get to my pops’ storage unit, my mom will bitch and lecture her. That’s her MO. In the backseat, my sister, Whit, fourteen, is on her cell phone. She doesn’t smell a thing, or maybe she’s numb to it. I wish I’d woken up early enough to ride with my mom, bu
t even after flying in from RI, she managed to keep farmers’ hours and was gone from the La Quinta before I got up.

  Dee belts out, How do you want it, girl, singing along with the radio. Dee’s dress straps slide real awkward on her vanishing frame. In the rearview mirror, Whit rolls her eyes at the performance. She’s been surrounded since birth.

  Dee whips the rental Mustang around curves like a giddy teenager. Living in Vegas the past year has turnt her up. Her license was reissued only three months ago and already she is enjoying the invincible, morning-after drunk drive.

  I ask how her night went, but the station throws on “Let It Burn” and she starts rambling about Usher, little femme this, soft in the lips that, etc. She swerves.

  I crack the passenger window and take in the clean Washington morning to keep from staring at the speedometer. The roads are wide and coarse, tires working over the pavement so heavy I can feel the vibration.

  Whit joins in and starts talking about another pop star, one I’ve never heard of. They’re throwing comments back and forth and Dee isn’t watching the road. Neither of them misses a beat.

  I turn to ask Dee to slow down. Before I can, she slides me a cellophane bundle of painkillers, Perc 30s, the ultimate, each one smaller than a pencil eraser, guaranteed to make the entire world your personal couch. They’re a good way to lose touch, first with your body, then with your troubles. It’s like going limp in the jaws of a bigger animal.

  “How’d you get these?” I ask.

  “I’m in pain, sweetheart.” She looks at me and her glasses are mirrors, too big for her face. She’s always had a link on goods that border reckless—chop-shop cars, wholesale ammo, piss-cleaning tonic. She tells me to pop a few.

  I don’t admit I’m familiar. Plus, a few of these will have you vomiting on your Sunday clothes. When I visited Dee and Whit in the desert last Thanksgiving, they hadn’t made the small town house a home yet. It had been a few months since Pops had died and they’d come down to Vegas from Washington, but they were still living out of boxes, no food in the house. When he was alive, Pops had always done the cooking. Dee wore a black-and-white dress and got us tickets to the Cirque show, the one dedicated to the King of Pop. But then she threw up on herself at dinner, and just Whit and I went.

  I look at my sister in the rearview and almost give the pills back. But Whit keeps texting without even looking up. The car bumps over the breakdown-lane grooves and I tuck the pills into my pants pocket and wish she had better kin.

  LAST YEAR, AFTER my pops’ funeral, my mom and Dee made sure his storage was locked down from the rest of the family, afraid it’d be picked clean like carrion. But we avoided sorting it until now. I think Dee and Mom wanted to wait because they thought Whit and I couldn’t handle it. Maybe they couldn’t handle it themselves. Whit and I shared the feeling that if we pieced together the scraps of Pops’ life we might become brother and sister for real, and our cousins and aunts on Pops’ side would become family again and we could keep it moving. At least I felt that way—I just imagined it for her.

  A man at the funeral, an uncle or cousin, wearing a yellow dress shirt with a teal tie, gathered us together after the service. He told us not to let the gaps form and handed out his number. Then he hugged Whit and me and left the reception. We never talked about it.

  After the service, Mom flew back to RI, and I flew back to Ithaca, back to substitute teaching and bartending at the Good Life, to serving watered-down drinks to kids with fake IDs, waiting for something better. At that point, Dee and Whit were still up in Washington, on the edge of the cliff. I picked up my car at Rochester International and drove I-90 away from Lake Ontario thinking up corny-ass metaphors about my people and solitude, passing by secluded towns nestled just off the highway behind groves of trees in the near darkness. So close to the traffic, but out of sight. A few months after the funeral, Dee and Whit moved out to Vegas. Whit and I let the gaps form.

  BIG AL, THE storage man, remembered how my pops had won the Rose Bowl for the Huskies in ’84. He let the storage slide for a year free of charge, but it got to the point where he laid down ultimatums—ship it, sell it, or sort it. So we all flew back out to Washington to get on with it.

  Dee’s arm draped on the steering wheel is skin and bones. She lights a cigarette. It’s good—slows her down some. Her lipstick marks up the beige paper. Sometimes Mom talks about my pops’ other women. It’s the only time I hear venom in her voice. But I only know Dee, and that was by the book, after my parents split, so the story goes. No one else ever came around and I never got around to asking him. Then after he died, all of a sudden Mom’s memory became real rosy—Pops the bighearted gentle giant. Whit remembers him like that too, I don’t know how. But until recently, she’s been on the periphery of my life so I can’t claim to see what she sees. That one’s on me. She’s only fourteen. I’m twenty-three.

  In the rearview, her eyes stay fixed on her phone. Outside of my aunt’s face being etched in hers, I don’t know much at all about Whitney. I could lie and say it’s the age, but I don’t know a damn thing about the scale she uses to weigh the world.

  This past spring, a girl at her school climbed one of the light poles at the football field and jumped off. Even though Whit didn’t know her well, she stayed home a few days after that. I checked up on her then, but Dee said Whit was doing good. By her final report card, she’d raised her failing grades. Dee always tells her about me—how her brother was an English major at an Ivy League school and how she should send her papers my way. Dee throws dirt on my name too—that I drink too much and spend too much money on women—but she throws dirt on everyone. I’d like to help with Whit, but our correspondence fades in and out.

  The day is heating up. When we arrive, the storage unit is packed end to end like a good cannoli.

  My mom stands with her hands on her hips, same way my nonna would’ve, glaring at Dee. “You look awful,” she says.

  “Shut up, Letty.”

  But Mom’s right. Dee’s weave is a little crooked.

  “How late were you out?” Mom says.

  I think Dee’s about to hand me her shades, take off her earrings, square up. “None ya damn business,” she says.

  Mom looks to me.

  “What a great day,” I joke.

  Whit’s eyes are wide, staring at the mess, and she pays no attention. Dee brushes by my mom to look at the unit.

  It’s too early in the day to pop pills, but I feel them there in my pocket—even just a half could help ease the shit.

  Mom fans her hand in front of her nose. “You smell like a bar,” she tells Dee.

  “Yeah, and you smell like a prude.”

  I step over and make a mock show of shielding my mom, patting her head. Her hair is thinning, and worrying has kept the weight off. For a minute, I’m nostalgic for the days when my boys would play-flirt with her. I smile at Dee. “Look at you two lovebirds,” I say.

  “Boy, shut up,” she says. “You know damn well I’m not in the mood.” She takes the mess in.

  My mom has already made a small pile.

  “What’s that?” Dee asks.

  “Just some things I thought Gio might want,” Mom says.

  Dee bends down and picks up a crystal vase. “Your son wants the Baccarat?”

  “I bought that in California,” my mom says.

  “With Lonnie’s money,” Dee says.

  Whit turns around and draws out an Oh, the drama gets her attention.

  “Well, maybe if you got here on time,” Mom says proper-like and walks into the narrow space she’s cleared already.

  Dee stares at me, and my face looks round in the lenses of her shades. “Your mom is a greedy bitch,” she says and turns back toward the car.

  “Hey—” I start but Dee keeps going.

  “Fuck this shit,” she says. “I don’t need this. Waking up at the crack of dawn like you’re fucking treasure-hunting. It’s just a damned storage unit, Letty. You need to get laid.” />
  I am torn between laughing and defending my mom, who should’ve reignited her life a while back.

  Whit runs to hug Dee, one of those full-body hugs where you fit your whole self into another person. My mom’s shoulders slump, so I go over and throw an arm around her. She keeps her eyes on Dee, face tight with poison words swallowed.

  Dee says something to Whit that I can’t hear, then pushes her off, wobbles, enough so I think she might fall, and opens the car door. She’s racing somewhere. It scares me because I know the feeling well. So did my pops, who died in the ring throwing haymakers at the thing. I’ve been there myself, cracking jokes while sinking into something murky.

  Dee starts the car and rolls down the window. She looks at us a second, then turns up the radio and leaves, peeling out of the row—still driving invincible.

  Whit begins taking some pictures of the stuffed unit with her phone.

  “What a great example she’s setting,” Mom says. I say nothing and she asks me how late Dee was out. I tell her I don’t know. She asks Whit too, then softens and asks me if I think Dee is all right.

  “She’s a grown-ass woman,” I say.

  Mom drags out a crushed box from a heap of shit. “If she wasn’t going to be here, why’d she even come out? We were supposed to do this together.”

  I dig into a box of my bloodline. “Yeah, well, now we’re not.”

  July in Washington isn’t that hot, but the storage unit is an insulated toaster and Pops saved everything—blank Polaroids, backpacks with broken zippers, old newspaper articles about him, Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets, check stubs from his playing days made out to all sorts of family members I’ve never heard of, some ’80s gear that I snatch and rock without shame, and every piece of mail ever addressed to him. No lie, he saved autograph requests and delinquent phone bills alike. He even had one of my high-school report cards that I don’t remember sending him. It’s like he’d planned to hit the whole world back—he just waited too long.