Riot Street

by Tyler King

  Without a caterwauling drunk doing a rendition of Elle King at the mic and a table of others to pull focus, sitting under the full force of Ethan’s undivided attention is somewhat…daunting. The effect of him up close, it doesn’t dissipate.

  “There’s something I’m still having trouble with,” I admit.

  “Which is?”

  “Why? Why is this important to you?”

  “Isn’t it important to you?”

  That’s not the point.

  “Is this just about your personal fascination with my father? Because I’m not going to cave on an interview. If you’re playing the long game here, hoping I’ll warm up to you and bring the rest of the scattered survivors out of the woodwork for a big exclusive…”

  He smirks. “I’m not sure I’m capable of such elaborate scheming.”

  Ethan then takes a sip of his coffee when it becomes apparent I want a real answer.

  “You got my attention,” he says. “If I’d never heard of you, if I’d never met your father, I’d still want to know the person who wrote that essay.”

  “That much I believe.” I watch a man across the room play chess with himself under a painting of Slim Pickens riding the missile in Dr. Strangelove. “But what gives me pause, which I don’t think is unreasonable, is I want to know if you’re more interested in the topic of the essay than the words themselves.”

  He breathes out through his nose and regards me with something on the self-deprecating side of hostile. “You really have a low opinion of me, don’t you?”

  “No, I’m being careful. I don’t know you well enough to form a complete opinion.”

  Ethan slumps back and his eyes wander for a moment. When he refocuses on me, his demeanor’s changed. The same “abrupt” look that launched him into his lecture during my interview. His no-more-bullshit face. The I’ve-run-out-of-patience scowl.

  “You know…” Fingers scratch across his scalp like ants are crawling on him. “It’s killing me not to ask, so here it is: Why? I know you said you have ambitions, and that’s great, but why this essay? Because, I’m sorry, Avery, but it’s like you’re allergic to it. You put this ball in motion, and now you’re backing away from it. I know it wasn’t for attention. Right now…” He reaches into his pants pockets and pulls out his phone. “I could call my agent and by morning there’d be a bidding war for your memoir. A year from now you’d have a New York Times bestseller with a movie deal. Make your first million by the time you’re twenty-five. Go find yourself a house on an island somewhere and live the rest of your life off the royalties. But you sold an essay for, what, a few hundred dollars? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and fill my mouth with dark bitter black. My attention wanders toward the chess player again. He’s locked in a stalemate. “I had to get my foot in the door.”

  Ethan’s phone clatters on the coffee table at our feet. “Bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re lying to me or to yourself. I’m not sure which. If you don’t want to tell me, fine. But let’s not pretend I don’t know you at all.”

  My ears go hot. It spreads across my face and stings my teeth. “What is it you think you know?”

  “It’s starting to eat at you. I think if you could keep this thing bottled up any longer, you would. But it’s consuming you from the inside and it won’t stop until it’s eaten its way out.”

  I forgot the first rule of talking to another journalist: never engage their curiosity. And never trust someone you can’t lie to.

  “All I’m saying is…” He lowers his voice and closes in, compressing the swollen bubble between us. “You’re a commodity now whether you want to be or not. I know this job comes at a steep price for you,” he says, “but you do have an opportunity to control the narrative. Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think there’s a part of you that wants to tell these stories. If that’s true, you don’t have to do it alone.”

  It’s a nice idea, using my pen to become the avenging angel of those whose tragedy has become farce. But there’s a reason we’ve resisted the prospect of a life-changing payday. Everyone who came to Massasauga was running from something, and all were complicit in propping up the façade of their private utopia. They’ve suffered enough. I have no interest in inflicting any more pain. I think Ethan forgets that I’m still the daughter of a murderer. There are probably a few people out there who’d sleep easier if my parents and I hadn’t made it out alive.

  “Look, Avery.” He takes my coffee from my hands and sets it on the table. As if my undivided attention isn’t enough. “You have talent. I didn’t just read your essay, I read everything I could find with your name on it. And I think you can only get better at a magazine like ours. But the thing that struck me about your essay was how impersonal it was. It read like you were writing about a different person. Like an outsider looking in rather than a participant. Why is that?”

  There isn’t a short answer to his question. I don’t like thinking of us as the same person. Echo lives back there. I’m here. Better it stays that way. Ethan can’t understand what a difficult division that is to maintain.

  He takes my silence as a response.

  “Fair enough.” Ethan scrubs his hands through his hair like reshuffling the deck of his thoughts. “Here’s my advice…” He turns to face me, one leg bent on the sofa, his arm draped over the back. “Don’t write about Echo. Let Echo write about the world.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You give Cara her essays, but you turn the focus around. You have a unique perspective that no one else can duplicate. What does someone who’s survived what you have, who was raised the way you were, dissect and distill from society? You can sell Cara on that. It’s a compromise, yes, but we’re offering you a platform to say anything you want. What possible good excuse do you have for turning down that kind of freedom?”

  Good question.

  I spent a decade without the right to fully express myself. Every word manipulated. Every thought stifled. My life was a decaying fantasy created to sustain a megalomaniac’s straw kingdom. We were his toys, and nothing good or charitable he ever did was without self-serving purpose. Like free-range chickens, we were kept just happy enough not to skitter away. Just healthy enough to be tasty.

  “And Cara will go for this?”

  “You have a brief window to exploit her affinity for you. Don’t waste it.”

  “But what about real stories? I want to prove I can be a great reporter.”

  “I’m not going to let you rot in a basement. If you take this job, I promise I’ll find other work for you to do. Other ways you can contribute and show off. I know you’re afraid of sinking to the bottom of the pool and being forgotten. I won’t let that happen, Avery. Trust me.”

  I want to. It’s quite an attractive carrot he’s dangling. But I know better. Never trust a man promising to make all your dreams come true.

  “Are you sure you’ve thought about this?” I ask. “Us working together?”

  “I’m game if you are.”

  Maybe the magazine’s first offer wasn’t a dream gig, but who am I kidding? I don’t have editors lining up and begging for me. Ethan has gone to considerable trouble to convince me to say yes. Nowhere else am I going to find an advocate with as much clout as Ethan has at Riot Street.

  And perhaps now I can picture more nights like this one. Sitting around a table arguing and laughing at a bar with the staff. Late nights over coffee, Ethan and me combing through public records and interview transcripts. Eating takeout at our desks with Ed breathing down our necks to finalize our copy before deadline. Sitting in front of the TV with pizza to watch C.J. eviscerate some arrogant schmuck on a Bill Maher panel. How can I pass this up?

  Yet he didn’t answer my first question.

  “Why?” I ask again. “Why go out of your way?”

  Ethan stares at me for a moment, impassive. “Because you’re completely unpretentious,” he says. “You don’t know how rare a quality
that is out there. You’re going to do great things.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not sure that’s really an answer.”

  “Then let me ask you something. Why become a journalist? After everything you’ve been through, why not live a quiet, obscure life somewhere?”

  I suppose it’s for the same reason anyone else goes into this line of work. “I want to change the world.” It sounds simplistic and immature, I know, but it’s the truth. “I want the stories I tell to matter—to do something important and consequential. Because I hate hypocrisy. I hate manipulation, corruption; the things we do to each other. One day I want to write a story that makes a difference. Something people will point to decades later and say, ‘That was the day everything changed.’”

  “That’s why I want to work with you,” Ethan says. “That’s the right answer.”

  6

  The Addict

  I write MARLA in bold black marker on one of the blue sticky name tags and slap it on my chest. No one who’s anyone in here uses their real name. We’re all Jim or Mark or Karen.

  Sunday night, after the church ladies have triple-counted the tithings envelope and stuffed it in a safe, wheeled the TV and DVD player into a padlocked closet, a couple dozen people are scattered on folding chairs in the basement rec room of Episcopal Church in the West Village. We sip coffee from little paper cups and nibble on grocery store chocolate chip cookies as a middle-aged man in a green polo shirt and sports coat steps up to the lectern.

  “Hello, my name is Gary, and I’m an addict.”

  “Hello, Gary,” the room replies.

  “Welcome to the Help and Healing group of Narcotics Anonymous. I’d like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers.”

  Gary bows his head, scabby scalp of new hair plugs staring us in the face like a teenager’s erupted zits. On the wall behind him are bulletin boards with colorful paper flyers begging for church volunteers and announcing the church’s food drive, Children’s Shakespeare in the Garden, and Parents’ Night Out.

  Then he says, yellow mustache hanging over graying teeth, “I want to extend a special welcome to newcomers. If anyone here is attending their first NA meeting, would you like to introduce yourself?”

  The first six rows all glance at each other, to the sides and behind them, searching for a new face. Several pairs of eyes land on me, but I’m not getting up there.

  “Anyone who is new to this meeting?”

  A tight-and-toned woman in a headband and neon purple tank top with coordinating yoga pants lifts out of her chair, hesitates, sits, then dashes to the lectern. Fingers gripping the edges for support, tendons straining in her tanned arms, she clears her throat and lifts her chin.

  “Hi,” she says, sharp and neat like a department store clerk who’s about to blind you with perfume. Her sandy-blond ponytail sways with the nervous vibration running up her spine. Clears her throat again: “I’m Sarah, and I’m an addict.”

  “Hello, Sarah.”

  I sit in the back, out of range of the hyper-fundie twelve-steppers and their evangelic devotion. In the corner, away from the knee-bouncers and arm-scratchers who might mow me down in the event of a sudden escape. The ones still clinging to their doses from the methadone clinic.

  “So…” Sarah’s lips turn a deep shade of tense, bloody pink as she presses them together with all the force of a gator bite. “I nearly murdered my husband this morning.”

  An elderly woman in vintage Chanel cackles from the fourth row.

  Gary steps in. “Go ahead, Sarah. There’s no judgment here.”

  I do these a couple times a year—in rec rooms like this one with the soccer moms and bankers. The university professors and retail clerks in community centers. Combat vets and retirees in VFW halls. When I have a decision to make, these meetings help me think.

  I listen to their stories of cashing out their kid’s college fund to go on a week-long bender in a $500-a-night hotel room. How Ron stiffed his convalescent mother-in-law on the nursing home check to score a hit then wound up on a hospital gurney with tubes in his stomach. When the boss just went too fucking far this time, so Megan got a fix on her lunch break and left a Chipotle dump on his leather chair.

  “…I thought it was irritable bowel syndrome, always having to get up in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, at the movies,” Sarah says. “I thought my husband just had a sensitive stomach…”

  But most of the time it’s about the craving. The taste on their tongues that won’t rinse out. It stalks them, haunts them. They imagine wild fantasies of what they’d do if pain and punishment were no concern. Or they talk about regret: people they’ve used and abused chasing the dragon. When they need a fix, nothing is sacred, and everyone’s expendable.

  “…while we were at church this morning, he got up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon…”

  I never got that far. Not so deep that I couldn’t see the surface. I played at the water’s edge, watching my only friend drift out with the suction of the ocean, getting smaller, until she disappeared beneath the waves.

  “…but the worship band started playing and I got worried, so I went to check on him…”

  One would be surprised how easy it is for a lost and lonely kid to become a statistic. When my mother and I escaped Massasauga, we had no money and only the clothes we wore that night. Surviving on charity and government assistance, we lived in shelters at first, then dirty motels once my mom found jobs waiting tables or bagging at the grocery store. I cleaned houses and ran errands for hobbled seniors. Took us a year to earn enough money to rent our first home. Bought an old used car, and a computer from Goodwill.

  “…and I found him jerking off in the choir room beside the Easter decorations and clothing-drive boxes…”

  Then I got kicked out of public school sophomore year. A social worker got involved, and I was referred to a shrink with a glass eye whose office smelled like kitty litter. That’s how I discovered the wonders of Zoloft and Lexapro, Valium and Klonopin. Dabbled a little in Effexor and Cymbalta while my psychiatrist turned me into a chemical experiment, trying to home in on the right combination and dosage for my particular mixture of depression, generalized social anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress. But the pills couldn’t cure my loneliness. The pit in my stomach grew more desperate and aching every day I spent longing to have just one friend in the world. Funny thing, though. An addict can never be your friend. They’re married to their fix. They’re ruled by it, worship it.

  “…chronic public masturbator…”

  Her name was Jenny. She was the big sister of the block. I became her favorite because I would share my pills with her. In return, she took me to the movies, to the diners and sports bars where the community college kids hung out. We stayed out all night riding around that shit town in her rusted Corolla. She would do my makeup and let me wear her clothes when we cruised the mall.

  “…attacked him with a plastic Easter Bunny lawn ornament…”

  Jenny was an addict. But not like the sloppy, skeletal, driftwood bodies you see on TV. She had a reliable supply from her dealer boyfriend and a steady job as a custodian at the nursing home. She taught me how to find the happy medium in my self-medication. How to make the nightmares go away. It wasn’t getting high, I told myself. It was getting better. Did you know heroin has anxiolytic properties? Any introvert in recovery will tell you they were never more socially engaged than when they were hooked. Until the fix wore off.

  Jenny overdosed in a dressing room at Victoria’s Secret wearing six pairs of stolen underwear. She always said she would never shoot it. That was for junkies. But sooner or later they all pick up a needle.

  I went to rehab three days later.

  That’s where I met Maureen, a seventy-two-year-old former stringer for the Associated Press. She’d covered presidents and riots, celebrities and coups. She’d also picked up a coke habit along the way. But she managed to kick it in the nineties and started
helping kids like me gain a little perspective. I was fascinated by her stories. Though they were a bit distorted by time and dementia, I listened to her talk for hours, imagining what I could see with a life like hers.

  When I got out of rehab five weeks later, my mom brought me home to our new apartment far from Jenny’s memory. Clean and straight, I was making another new start.

  “…but I didn’t use today,” Sarah says, her eyes red with stress-tears and pride. “I’m still eight years clean and looking forward to my divorce.”

  We clap, because today this chick is iron. She’s a goddamn steel trap. Sarah’s the Hoover Dam.

  “Thank you for sharing, Sarah. We’re proud of you.” Gary is back on his feet at the lectern, coffee stains in his mustache. “Now I’d like to recognize…”

  I come here to remember that we’re all one stupid decision away from ruining our lives. For some, it’s addiction. But whatever our vices or secret inclinations, we’re all walking a thin line between order and anarchy. Some have better balance than others. Several years ago I came to a dangerous precipice in the pursuit of affection. These meetings remind me how easy it is to fall over the edge.

  At the front of the room, a woman stands to read from the White Booklet: “‘Who is an addict? Most of us do not have to think twice about this question…’”

  People think addiction is obvious, that it lives on someone like a python coiled around their neck. But that isn’t always the case. It can be quiet and patient. It wants to hide. Jenny was a normal, decent person until she got her first taste.

  “‘…we lived to use and used to live…’”

  Becoming an addict wasn’t her fault. No one takes their first hit believing it’s the first step to the end of their life. That cold, dark place of desperation is born of a certainty that there is no reality in which living and sobriety can coexist. A gun in one hand, and a hit in the other. Because right up to the second we’re hooked, we know we never will be.