by Carol Anshaw
social life
It was bitter outside. The glass doors to his balcony were frosted halfway up. Nonetheless Nick had nothing covering him. He lay naked on a damp mattress which, he had to admit, didn’t smell all that great. It was very dark except for a path of light running across the carpet from the TV in the living room. It could be just past nightfall, or almost dawn. He had no idea what day it was. Forget days, even months. It was winter, though. He was sure of that. He didn’t know if he was lost because he had stepped outside time again, or just because he had been high. Whatever, this had been a wonderful set of days. Driving around, then here at home, it had all been very busy. Watching movies from his video collection. Thelma and Louise. The Double Life of Veronique. He had a girl over, one of the new hookers. Fleur. They had fun, he remembered, without being able to recall many particulars. They took a lot of Polaroids.
When he came into the living room, a commercial for a complicated exercise machine was on the television. He tried to focus. It was for abs. You looked great when you used it. It folded up and out of the way when you were done. The commercial provided no help in getting his bearings. The world of the ab machine was as sealed off from regular human life as he was. Good concept, though. Excellent abs could be part of the personal revision he was planning. New, improved packaging could definitely be a part of the whole thing. From there he drifted into a long, pleasant sequence of memories about some girls he met in Lincoln Park one night. In the chess pavilion. This was in high school.
He got up and roamed around and rummaged through the bottles lying everywhere on the carpet. All empties. Dry as bones. He sat down on the sofa, then lay back to map out a strategy.
Still dark, or maybe dark again. He went into the kitchen, like a detective, following a trail of blood and broken glass. The apartment must have been broken into. The kitchen floor was sticky with spilled beer and in peeling one foot off it, he lost his balance a little. Looking down, he could see that something was wrong. His big toe. It wasn’t really secured to his foot, not the way it should be. It kind of flapped and wiggled with each step. It was crusted over, but blood seeped out anyway. He was going to have to do something about this. This definitely had to be put on the agenda.
Inside the fridge. A jar of tartar sauce and a Styrofoam clamshell. DO NOT OPEN said the clamshell.
No beer. No bottles on the counter either. On a cabinet shelf, he found a creased piece of paper dusted with a cocoa-colored powder. He ran the paper under a nostril, but there was not enough left to get a mouse high.
He would have to get supplies in soon. He was getting the cranky feeling, and bad thoughts were muscling in. Time to find the sofa and lie down for a minute.
He called Martin, the dealer, but only got his machine. He left a message and smoked a couple of cigarettes. He tried to be patient, but patience was hard when you were coming down, when you had sandpaper routing out your veins.
Finding Martin was the best option because for a little extra, he would drop off the dope. All Nick had to do was pull some cash across the street at the ATM, and then come back here and wait. There was plenty of money in the ATM. Until he fell off the wagon this time, he’d been working construction with a lot of overtime. He was going to have to see about getting back to work. Not just yet, though.
When Martin didn’t call back, Nick prepared to go out. There would be no dope tonight. He would have to default to booze and none of the nearby stores would deliver to him anymore. Going out presented challenges. Getting dressed, for one. So many tricky steps. Finding clothes. Finding clean clothes. Clean enough. Getting into them. Shoes were always a problem. His feet had swollen after so much time in bed. And now there was the added factor of the toe, which had a bad color and an impressive largeness. Impossible to get it into any shoe.
He pulled stuff down from the high closet shelf. He got hit on the head with an old wood tennis racket in its press. He knew by how much this hurt that he was getting too close to sober.
“Yes!” He found his old slippers—a present from Carmen during one of his stints in rehab. They were plush-lined and didn’t have soles and had Donald Duck on their fronts, but he decided they were fine, really.
He fell going down the stairs, but when he checked himself out at the bottom, he was okay. His car was parked at a jaunty angle across its space and the space next to it, and before he got there he knew Carmen had already come over and put a club on the steering wheel so he wouldn’t be able to drive. She was not speaking to him these days. She had gone to meetings where they told her this was the best thing, setting boundaries, letting him hit bottom. Carmen was always doing the right thing. Fuck her.
He hailed a cab on Ashland. It pulled over and let out four, maybe five people—girls in cocktail dresses, two guys in dinner jackets. “Party on,” Nick said, giving them his blessing as he folded himself into the backseat.
The cab driver was a black man in a crocheted cap. He was so small he could barely see over the steering wheel. When Nick climbed into the car, he turned around and said, “I am sorry. I cannot take you.”
“You’re a cab, aren’t you?”
“I do not want any trouble.”
“There’s not going to be any trouble. I just need you to take me down to Belmont.”
“I cannot do that. I must have you out of the taxi. I am off duty.”
“But you picked me up.”
“No. I was leaving off the party people. And now I am off duty.”
Nick argued with him a little longer, but the little guy was not going to budge. Nick wasn’t sure what his problem was.
It took forever to find another cab—it was weird how many people were out tonight, and how many of them were drunk—but finally he did, and this one took him down to Belmont with no trouble. The driver, who must have weighed well over three hundred pounds, gave Nick his restaurant recommendations. He loved Old Country Buffet. He was a buffet man. Nick was all edges by now, coming down fast. He sat very quietly in the back, making his presence as small as possible. When they pulled up in front of the store, he tried to get the cabbie to wait.
“Pay up first.”
Nick gave him what he thought was a twenty, but might have been a fifty. “But you’ll wait?”
“I’ll be right here,” he said. As soon as Nick got out, the cab zoomed off.
The store on Belmont wasn’t a place anyone would go for regular liquor shopping. It didn’t stock fine cognacs or have sales help to suggest wine pairings for your menu. It sold beer and liquor, crappy sweet wine, cigarettes, jerky, that was about it. The clerk behind the counter had no interest in chitchat. He had an air of end-stage weariness. He’d seen and heard everything already. Don’t even bother, his face said. The good thing about the store—the feature for which it had gained its reputation—was that it would sell to anybody, in any shape.
Behind the clerk, on a small TV with fuzzy reception, he saw a show of people dancing in gowns and tuxes. There was a big band in the background.
“What’s this? Lawrence Welk?”
“Get a grip,” the clerk said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. It’s the new millennium. They’re in L.A. It’s been on all day. Started on some tiny island in the Pacific. Where you been, buddy?”
“They’re partying like it’s 1999, because it is 1999.” This from a kid behind him, a young guy wearing a quilted jacket liner and cloth work gloves. He looked Nick over, pointed at his slippers.
“Nice shoes,” he said. He was a fashion critic.
Beer presented a transportation problem he wasn’t up to dealing with tonight. (Beer was an ironic beverage of choice for a heavy-ish drinker like himself, he realized this.) He decided on two handles of Jack Daniels as a more prudent, more portable purchase. He added a couple of Hershey bars to the tab, stuffing them in his pockets.
He pissed in the alley behind the store, then had a few belts from one of the bottles. To do this, he had to hoist the jug as if he were a prospector in the Old West. To comp
lete the gesture, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said “ptwawww.”
He was smiling at his own joke as he stepped out of the way for a beater truck coming slowly down the alley. Mexican junk men trawling through the night for scrap metal. No holiday for them. They stared out their window at him, as though he was a roadside attraction, but not a particularly interesting one.
He saw that the young guy had come back here, too. He had put a twelve-pack on top of a Dumpster and was popping cans and drinking them down, getting there as fast as he could. A fellow traveler.
“I didn’t realize it was New Year’s Eve,” Nick said. “I’m glad I didn’t miss the whole celebration. He tapped his bottle against the kid’s beer can. He leaned against the Dumpster, looking up at the sky, picking out the few stars bright enough to make it through the ambient urban glow. Capella in Auriga. The Big Dipper. Pollux to the south. He stood like this as he waited for the whiskey to burn through his system. This was the payoff moment, when everything hungry got fed.
The young guy offered no response except to pop open another can. They were both, in their own ways, busy. Hard at the work of getting high. When they could finally stop, nicely buzzed, they sat on someone’s back steps, companions. It was cold in the alley, but friendly. When they were drunk enough, they chatted a little. The kid’s name was Arliss. He had dropped out of Northwestern, or was thrown out, he wasn’t clear on that. He started out at a party much earlier. At that time he had a lot of company and a jacket with a lining. Nick told him a funny story about the nice hooker. Fleur. It was good to have a little social life like this, someone on the same wavelength.
“The thing is,” he told the kid, “even though it’s sometimes a lot of trouble, I really love getting drunk.”
They were in agreement on this. Nick saw a link between the two of them, a possibility that here was someone who would understand.
“I know things. Things no one else knows yet.”
“Like predicting the future?” Arliss said. He was lighting up a small, sweet cigar.
“No, no. Like understanding the universe. Sometimes I snort. You know, heroin.”
Arliss didn’t have a response to this. That was okay with Nick.
“Sometimes when I’m really high it’s like I walk into a room and it’s filled with levers and switches and I am given total understanding of how everything works. Macro to micro. I know the names of some planets far far out in the universe and understand the behavior of subatomic particles. I know how general relativity hooks onto quantum mechanics. How gravity weighs in. I understand the Theory of Everything, which doesn’t even exist yet. Then I sober up and lose it all.”
“Bummer,” Arliss said, then after what seemed to Nick like a very long pause, but might only have been a minute, “You wouldn’t have an extra hat, would you?”
prize
Alice burned her fingertips where they overlapped the pot holder. Her beer-batter crispy shrimp had been about to burn and she was careless in her hurry to rescue them. Too late she saw it wasn’t really a pot holder she grabbed out of one of Carmen’s kitchen cabinets, but an old Bears knit cap made of something synthetic that sizzled away between her hand and the cookie sheet she just pulled from the oven. A dozen shrimp scattered across the countertop. Carmen, taking charge of the situation, opened the freezer and stuck Alice’s hand into the ice cube bin.
Ahhh.
“A secret sister bonding ritual! The Icing of the Hand,” Rob said, coming in through the kitchen door. He was a compact guy, a couple of inches shorter than Carmen. Alice thought this was part of what made them adorable together. Today he wore cutoffs and a muscle T-shirt, but most conspicuously he wore an Einstein wig. He loved costuming for occasions.
“Kitchen casualty,” Carmen told him.
“I’m a klutz is all,” Alice said.
“Let’s take a look. I’m pretty good at burns. Beauty salons are hazardous territory.” He took hold of her wrist and turned her hand so he could inspect the fingertips. “Nothing to worry about. Cold was the right direction. You have a capable nurse here.” He grazed Carmen’s cheek with a kiss. “Put some cubes in a towel and keep icing it.”
“Okay,” Carmen said, then bossed Alice toward the door. “Let’s go outside now. The shrimp will have to wait. We need to make a toast to Nick. Before he flees.”
As Rob pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator, he said, “And remember: E equals something squared.”
After initially recoiling from Rob—early on he came to a show of hers, pointed his forefinger like a gun at this, then that painting, saying “Like it”—Alice had come around to being crazy about him. Whenever Carmen complained about his passivity, or his cultural ignorance, Alice said “yeah yeah, shut up. You got yourself a good one.” Alice liked how he treated Carmen, put her on a float in the parade.
Carmen was happy to throw this little party—happy that Nick, out of the blue and against all odds—had given them all an occasion for celebration. And the weather had gone along with the social plan, so perfect outside, so overwhelmingly June, everything bleeding out color—lawn, trees, the embankment of the railroad tracks scattered with wildflowers from a spring community project. Her yard, with the years and perennials and Rob helping, was now a respectable garden. Rob stood in the middle of it and popped the cork, massaging it out of the bottle, into a bunched-up bar towel that muffled the carbonated thwap to a sputter. It wasn’t real champagne, only sparkling apple juice. Everyone got rid of any alcohol—threw it out or locked it up—whenever Nick was around. A lesson they’d all learned one or another hard way with overlooked aftershave, vanilla extract, and, one time, canned heat for a chafing dish.
“To a maverick explorer, a Shackleton of space!” was what Carmen came up with when everyone’s glass was filled. She was quoting the introduction given Nick as he stepped onstage earlier this afternoon to accept a small, bronze trophy artistically shaped like a melted radio telescope, which was to say shaped like a hand-thrown cereal bowl. She was astounded that this turned out to be a major prize. There must have been 300 people in the auditorium down at school. Even with his personal valleys having become so deep, Nick clearly still had the ability to scale peaks in astronomy. Which made Carmen wonder what he might have accomplished if he hadn’t had to drop out so often, drop out then recover, using up so much of his allotment of self on falling and righting.
He still held on to his trophy; he was clearly nervous. He had sweated through, in dark quarter moons, the underarms of his sport jacket. His T-shirt was white, his jeans black. His skin had a freshly scrubbed look, his teeth gleamed. He had dealt with his receding hairline by shaving his head. Carmen knew through Alice that he had been on an improvement program. Micro-dermabrasion. Teeth whitening. Whatever—he embodied the notion of springing back.
She feared this tiny scaffold of glory would have a trap door, but what the hell, today she figured she might as well just be happy for him.
Nick watched Rob work the cork free of the bottle. Even though he knew it was only fizzy juice, he still got a little rush—desire spun with urgency. A frothy little mix in his head. The smallest events—
a billboard featuring black people involved in situations of sex and cognac
a bottle of pills in a friend’s medicine cabinet (he couldn’t ever not check)
a pair of women getting physical with each other, even just hugging hello in a shampoo commercial
—any of these would trigger a glimmery surge inside him.
“Hey,” he said in response to the toast, but from there couldn’t find any more words. The others waited patiently until they understood he wouldn’t be coming up with a speech, and then they just began to sip their fizzy juice and talk among themselves. That was okay. No speech was really required; he had already amazed them.
“Are those orthopedic?” Loretta gestured toward Alice’s sport sandals. She was here by herself. Horace was not welcome at social gatherings, but for new reasons. Inste
ad of insulting everyone, he now forgot who they were, and how they connected to him. His bewilderment was too tragic to make him and everyone else go through an afternoon of it.
Alice didn’t bother answering; she understood her mother wasn’t asking a real question. Loretta, even though she had retired into a life without any situations for which she needed to look businesslike, wore red pumps with three-inch heels. She subscribed to the belief that heels make a woman’s calves look more shapely. Carmen says if Loretta had lived in China, she’d have had bound feet. At the moment she had a glow to her. Alice liked her mother least when she glowed like this. It wasn’t a glow of true happiness, more a phony patina of nervous excitement, as though she were back in real estate, showing a dazzling house she knew held ferocious mold in the basement.
Loretta had already moved past her little swipe at Alice, and was glowing now, toward Nick. “I’m just so proud of you, honey.” She reached up, maybe to scruff some hair he once had, as if he were still a boy with a crewcut, then, seeing that her hand was currently headed for an expanse of sweaty shaved scalp, she pulled back awkwardly, then bent her gesture into a little hand flourish, like a circus performer beckoning applause for her trained poodles. “Proud of all my children!” she finished.
Alice looked over at Carmen, who crossed her eyes. The two of them disagreed on the subject of their mother. Alice thought she was just a little mean-spirited, a little hunched from a lifetime under their father’s oppression. Carmen thought that, had Horace requested it, Loretta would have locked her kids in a bamboo cage half underwater, like in The Deer Hunter, and conscripted them as players in games of Russian roulette. When they saw that movie together, Carmen thought it was the perfect metaphor for their childhood.
