We All Fall Down

by Nic Sheff

  “Man,” I say, probably sounding too excited. “This place is super great. How long have you and Kelly been living here?”

  Just about two years, he tells me. They moved up from Savannah, where he used to work leading carriage tours around the city.

  “I’ll tell you, man, you wanna hear some interesting stories, just talk to a carriage driver. Those guys I worked with were like history geniuses. Did you know the pirate Blackbeard held the city of Charleston for ransom? I mean, that motherfucker stuck up the whole goddamn place. He used to light fuses in his beard when he was charging into battle so there’d be all this smoke comin’ off him—scare the shit outta everybody. Blackbeard was a heavy dude. All those pirates were.”

  “Pirates, huh?”

  He goes on to tell me about how almost all the pirate captains were ex-Navy-trained soldiers who had been either disenchanted or disengaged with the service. He talks to me about their ships and military strategies—both of us still passing the bowl.

  “Down here,” he says, “we all come from a culture of fighters. Sure, there was the Civil War and all, but it’s more’n that. The way I was brought up, back in Mobile, my daddy instilled in me that it was my duty to serve my country. Joinin’ the service wasn’t a question; it was something I had to do.”

  He tells me about going to school at the Citadel and how, after graduating, he joined the Rangers and was deployed to a bunch of different unstable Latin American countries.

  “Basically,” he says, as though talking in a dream—his eyes are good and glazed over at this point—“our orders were just to march through the jungle until we met resistance. When we met resistance, well, it was either they killed you or you killed them. I had no idea what the hell I was doing there. All I knew was that these people were trying to kill me. So, yeah, I come back to the States and start doin’ a little reading and educating myself—a little growing up—then I find out what we were really doin’ in those countries. Hell, it makes me sick.”

  Stuttering out “Jesus Christ” is the best I can do.

  “Well, whatever, I was so goddamn young—a little kid. I don’t regret it. I mean, how could I? It’s made me who I am. I had to go through it. And I got this awesome life now—good friends, good food, good drink, all good things, right?”

  I scratch absently at the back of my neck. “Yeah, man, I know what you mean. You really can’t regret that shit. I mean, it takes what it takes for each of us to learn and, yeah, like you said, grow up.”

  His head nods. “Yup, I’ve lived life just about as hard as I could and, man, I wouldn’t take it back, not any of it. Hell, maybe I’ll get the courage to write a book someday, too. That’s always been a dream of mine.”

  “Hell yeah,” I tell him. “You should.”

  We go on talkin’ like that for a good long while—him mostly telling stories and me mostly listening. I mean, fuck, man, I could go on listening to his stories all night. I just want to absorb everything—hold on to it forever—and I’m pretty damn sure that’s not just ’cause of all the chemicals I got pumping through my bloodstream.

  But, anyway, yeah, we keep on talking until Russell’s girlfriend, Kelly, opens the door and jokingly scolds him for being rude to the other guests, so we both get up and head back out to the party.

  “Hey,” says Russell, as we half stagger down the hall, “you got work tomorrow?”

  I tell him I don’t.

  “All right, then,” he slurs, whacking me on the back in an awkward display of male affection. “Then I’m gonna take you crabbing, okay?”

  I nod. “Yeah, sure, what’s that?”

  He ignores my question. “Good, good. You don’t have a phone, right? So I’ll pick you up at noon. You got that?”

  I nod again, figuring he probably won’t remember any of this tomorrow, anyway.

  When Sue Ellen sees me, she seems pretty happy Russell and I have hit it off so well. Somehow it seems to mean a lot to her. She kisses me publicly, which is rare for her, but I figure she’s a little lit herself.

  “I love you,” she says.

  And I tell it back to her, fumbling to get a cigarette out with my useless hands.

  It’s then that we hear the cat shriek loud, and I glance over to see it bolting from the grill like a blur of gray shadow, scaling a tree and continuing to meow pathetically.

  “Russ,” says Kelly, all panicky, “she must’ve jumped on the grill. We gotta do something.”

  Russell scratches at his cheek thoughtfully for a few seconds before answering in an even more exaggerated drawl. “Ain’t nothin’ we can do, honey. I mean, yeah, it’s gonna hurt her like hell for a while, but I guarantee you one thing: She ain’t never gonna do that again.”

  Everyone kinda laughs, and the cat lets out one last pissed-off-sounding meow from the top of the tree.

  I reach into the cooler to get another beer.

  Thinking, man, even that cat’s got enough sense not to jump on a hot grill twice, no matter how good whatever’s left cooking on there might look to her.

  But me? Well, I figure I can outsmart that fucking grill this time.

  I put my hand over the coals glowing orange, smoldering.

  I lower it.

  Closer and closer.

  So far, so good.

  So far, so good.

  So far…

  So good.

  Ch.22

  It’s barely even light out yet when I convulse awake from a vivid, anxious sleep. Sweat that has soaked into the sheets makes me shiver uncontrollably, and my heart beats fast and panicked. The gray morning fills the room, shining through the slatted blinds, bleeding all color out pale and muted. My eyes are pinned back wide open. My fingers clutch at nothing. My stomach crawls up through my throat and out my mouth as I bolt for the bathroom.

  I vomit red, yellow liquid projectile into the porcelain toilet. My brain swells. My skull cracks from the pressure. The vomit comes again—gagging—my face a mess of snot and tears, with veins standing out all over.

  The smell’s enough to make me pass out right there. I hit the cool white-tiled floor, my burning-up cheek pressing helplessly against it. There’s nothing to do but lie here shivering, my knees pulled up tight against my chest.

  I try to slow my breathing down.

  I try to hold it together.

  I try to blink the world back into focus.

  As the gray light filters in.

  And a fat spider with long, coarse-looking hairs crawls cautiously up the side of the toilet toward the stench there. It disappears behind the dirty rim, and I quickly reach up to flush it away, along with all the vomit—or, well, some of it, anyway.

  I pull myself along the floor out into the kitchen, managing to stand, but still really shaky.

  What I need is a drink.

  I mean, I swear, it’s not that I want to or anything, but I’ve got no choice. It’s the only way I can possibly get through this day. And, besides, I have to go crabbing with Russell. So I need this drink.

  First, though, I gotta make sure Sue Ellen’s really asleep, ’cause she’ll freak the fuck out if she sees me drinking at, like, seven in the morning. Already she’s been gettin’ on my back a whole lot about how much I’m drinking. And she’s only aware of maybe half of what I’m actually consuming. So I go sneak back into the bedroom and see that she’s definitely still passed out, with the blanket pulled up so that only a mass of tangled black hair is visible against her pillow. Despite getting so sick, whenever I get drunk at night, I’m always jolted awake at six or seven. It’s been that way as long as I can remember, even back in high school at parties and things. My friends would sleep all morning, but I’d be up at dawn, thoughts racing, consumed by anxiety, unable to sit still—ending up having to take a walk or something while I waited for everyone else. But what I know now that I didn’t know back then is that there is a cure. All I’ve got to do is take a couple shots and I calm down immediately.

  So, uh, yeah, that’s the way
I play it this morning. I finish off the rest of the vodka in the freezer, and immediately warmth and tranquility fill my mind and body, like I’ve swallowed the sun down inside me.

  It’s a miracle, really.

  And so what if it’s all dependent on a substance? At least with drinking, my life won’t fall apart—not like it did with hard drugs. It’s just a, uh, a minor vice. That’s all.

  But, anyway, after finishing the bottle, I go clean up the bathroom so Sue Ellen won’t suspect anything—trying to cover up the smell with a can of hair spray. I’m not really sure how well it works. Still, I figure by the time she gets up, it should’ve all aired out a good bit. I leave it be at that and go make coffee and some toast with strawberry jam and butter. The sun is low and bright, its rays like the coils of an electric oven, the temperature gauge rising to the point of self-combustion.

  I mess with the air conditioner a little, but even on its highest setting, the apartment is still strangling hot as the paned glass windows compound the sunlight—trapping the layers of humid, palpable, dirty atmosphere in our own private ecosystem. With no chance of escape. I mean, no way out. All I can do is sit naked on the living-room couch—wrapped in a thin sheet—drinking down glass after glass of cold water—trying to quench my unquenchable thirst.

  The heat and alcohol leave me sort of blurred out—half awake, half asleep. I put on this zombie movie we got from Netflix, though I can barely focus on it at all. I mean, I guess I must pass out again, ’cause I wake up to the DVD menu repeating over and over. There’s a note from Sue Ellen on the coffee table next to me. She says she went to work and didn’t want to wake me. She says she loves me.

  I get up to go see what time it is, stopping at the refrigerator for a beer—panicking some when I see there are only two left. I’ll have to run to the liquor store really quickly with what little money I have left. I chug the first beer all the way down and then immediately pop the cap off the other, trying to, you know, sip at it more casually.

  The digital oven clock says it’s just before noon.

  I take a shower and run up the block to the dingy liquor store, where all the bottles are kept behind bulletproof glass. Actually, the whole counter and the cash register and the little old woman who works there are all kept safe behind the glass as well, so our transaction takes place through a metal drawer that slides back and forth from one side to the other. I put in ten dollars, mostly in change, and she passes me back a half-pint of no-brand vodka and a half-pint of no-brand whiskey. The woman’s here every day, looking like a high school librarian, with horn-rimmed glasses, a lot of lipstick, and a dowdy kind of jumpsuit thing. Her face is creased and folded and withered and wrinkled like a dried piece of fruit.

  She used to smile at me whenever I came in. Now she just stares at me with something like pity in her golden, black-spotted eyes—shaking her head—reluctant.

  Obviously, she doesn’t need to ID me anymore.

  I stuff both bottles into my pants pockets, muttering “thank you” and then turning to get the hell out of there. The little bell rigged up to the door jingles behind me.

  Fuck.

  I guess I gotta start switching up liquor stores. That goddamn woman makes me feel as guilty as hell. And, I mean, who is she to judge?

  Christ.

  I find myself running back home just so I can drink some of the vodka before Russell comes by. The whiskey bottle I hide in the small space behind the TV so Sue Ellen can’t find it. Doing this kind of shit, it’s hard not to think back on all those twelve-step meetings I used to go to. I remember hearing people talk about how they would do shit like hide bottles around the house or sneak their empties into the neighbors’ trash cans so the garbage people wouldn’t know how much they were drinking. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I remember them talking about how they had to keep changing liquor stores ’cause they were too ashamed to face the same employees every day—or multiple times a day. But the difference between me and all those people at the meetings is that I’m aware of the signs, right? And I know how to catch myself before falling down too far. They talk about how their lives had become unmanageable, the way my life did when I was using hard drugs. But for now, drinking and smoking pot, I haven’t had any negative consequences at all. So how could this be a problem? I mean, I keep telling myself it isn’t.

  For the first time in my life, I get to act like a normal twenty-something-year-old—carefree, going out to bars and having fun. Hell, even on my twenty-first birthday I was in a goddamn sober living. I’ve been totally robbed of all the experiences most kids my age get to have. Having to be sober was like being a forty-year-old trapped in a young adult’s body. How could I relate to any of my peers? It was like I’d come from a totally different planet. And all because my goddamn parents were so overprotective and reactionary they forced me to go into rehab when I was eighteen. Can you believe that? I’d been doing crystal meth for, maybe, four or five months, that’s it. But, of course, once I was in rehab, they brainwashed us all into thinking we have a disease, which is totally bullshit. I mean, cancer is a disease, HIV is a disease—addiction is so not. But they push that idea into our heads until we’re so broken down we can’t help but believe it. So, at that point, whenever I did use, of course I went all out. They’d programmed me to believe that was the only way I could do it. They created this self-fulfilling prophecy for me, and I just kept acting it out.

  But that’s all over now—the spell has been broken. I’m done with rehabs and twelve-steps and psych doctors and acupuncture and inner-child workshops and blah-fucking-blah-blah. I’m going crabbing with Russell. In Charleston, South Carolina. He picks me up a little after twelve thirty. Of all the celebrities and intellectuals and industry people and upper-crust New Yorkers and expensive doctors and whoever I’ve met in my life, I already have more respect for Russell than I’ve ever had for any of them. In LA, the first question everyone asks you is, “What do you do?” And how you’re treated from that point on is completely dependent on your answer to the question. But down here it doesn’t work like that. No one cares what you do. If anything, the way you’re judged is on how you live your life, how you treat your friends—simple, not-very-glamorous shit like that. At least, that’s the way Russell tells it. And, honestly, in my whole life, I can’t say I’ve met more’n one or two people like that, ever. My friend Akira, in San Francisco, is one. And I can’t even think of another.

  Except this guy Russell. Already I admire him absolutely.

  He knocks at the door, and I let him in really quickly to smoke a bowl before heading out.

  The truck he’s driving, he tells me, he borrowed from a friend, and there’s a very shy, skittish black dog behind the front seat. It looks like some sort of lab mix.

  “Oh,” he says, “that’s Carolyn’s dog, Luna. She asked me to watch her for a couple days.”

  I don’t know who Carolyn is, but whatever.

  Driving out toward the beach, the live oaks with roots breaking through the pavement give way to stinking marshland with canals cutting through like line drawings on colored paper. We drive over bridges, past falling-apart gas stations advertising boiled peanuts, cold beer, fish and grits. For all the opulence and old-money wealth of downtown Charleston, the surrounding areas are desperately poor. Trailer parks, boarded-up houses, Piggly Wigglys, Wal-Marts, that’s all there is. The heat makes the road shimmer.

  “You’ll like it down here,” Russell tells me. “It’ll do you good to slow down a little.”

  I nod, knowing that’s the truth for sure. “Yeah,” I say, my eyes fixed on nothing out the side window. “I’ve never been too good at that.”

  “Well,” he says, laughing a little, “I’m the champion of taking it easy, so you’re in good hands.”

  He pulls the truck into a McDonald’s parking lot, and we go over and wait in line idling at the drive-through.

  “You want anything?”

  “Nah,” I say.

&nbs
p; He orders a double Quarter Pounder with cheese and a large Coke, and then we drive ’round to the pickup window.

  The woman behind the glass is heavy, with extensions braided tight to her head. She leans out toward us.

  “You don’t want no fries with that, honey?”

  Russell smiles big, showing his square, white teeth. “No, ma’m. They tend to make me gassy.”

  She laughs and laughs, and I laugh, too.

  Russell thanks her and we get the food and we go on and, uh, get.

  The next stop we make is at a gas station, where Russell gets a twelve-pack of Budweiser and a net basket for crabbing, plus a pack of chicken necks for ninety-nine cents. I can’t really help buy anything, ’cause I spent the last of my money this morning. He tells me not to worry about it.

  “I worked on Wall Street, you know?” he says out of nowhere as we drive down the road, crossing bridges and passing strip malls. “Worked with a big firm playin’ stocks and whatever. I lived in New York for two years and made a bundle of money. Hell, I ain’t ever been more miserable in my whole life. There ain’t nothin’ worth workin’ like that for, all shut up inside all day. I’d rather be a little hard up and able to cook out, go walking on the beach, go crabbing with a fine gentleman like yerself.”

  “Ha,” I say.

  He veers the truck onto a side road, and suddenly we’re driving with tall marsh grass on either side of us, making our way deeper and deeper into the swamp.

  We park at the end of a splintering gray dock that stretches out into the murky channel of water reflecting sunlight.

  Russell grabs the cooler and beer and the net. I get the chicken and try to keep Luna from running off into the mud and oyster shells.

  We walk out all together onto the dock.

  As it turns out, crabbing isn’t really what I expected. I mean, it’s not too exciting or anything. Basically, what you do is you take a chicken neck and kinda weave it into the bottom of the net so it doesn’t fall out. Then you just lower the net into the water and wait. Then you wait some more. Then maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by and you pull up the net. If you’re lucky, there might be a couple of crabs in there eating the chicken. So you dump the crabs into the cooler and drop the net back into the water. Of course, a lotta times there aren’t any crabs at all, and you just gotta try again.