“I want to say ‘be careful,’” my mom said with tears in her eyes, “but I feel like that’ll just annoy you. So . . . stay out of jail and stay out of the army and you’ll be alright. And don’t die! Just don’t die.”
I hugged and kissed my mother and hopped into the cab. Gabe hopped into the bed of the truck. Manu and I each ate two hits of acid, and we hit the road.
By the time we got to Washington, Gabe and I were barely speaking. Too many days walking backward on the side of the road with our thumbs out, baking in the sun, covered in dust as cars roared by; too many hours making polite conversation with strangers who wanted us to come to Jesus or recognize the primacy of truck drivers in the American economy or sell us Amway; too many close calls. We’d covered the largest part of our journey in great time—only five days—but we knew there were still long miles ahead of us, miles made longer now that we couldn’t stand each other. We dragged our feet in Washington, gathering our courage for the big push to Alaska—doing yard work for cash, getting drunk, getting high—while I made time with Riley. That only made things worse.
Riley was petite with violently red hair, pale skin, and green eyes. She’d been born in South Africa and had never quite lost her accent, never quite fit in. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a red sweater and short white shorts, picking her way through the grass between the girls’ dormitory and the path to the dining hall like a prey animal warily crossing an unsheltered space. She had a low tolerance for bullshit, so we had clashed early and gone our separate ways.
We wound up in an environmental studies class together my final semester. She was outspoken and insightful in class, and, well, she had always been beautiful. I noticed her thin, freckled arm resting on the table one day and wondered if she had freckles everywhere. We began studying together, and then we were “studying together,” and then I was trying to get her to be my girlfriend. We made out ferociously a couple of times, but then she refused.
“It’s just that . . . I feel like you treat me as a woman first and as a person second. I want to be a person.”
I couldn’t get my head around what she was saying. I liked her, she liked me, what was the problem? Finally, I gave up. I wanted her in my life, and I wanted her in my room, hanging out with me while we did our homework. If she wouldn’t deign to be my girlfriend, I would force myself to endure that humiliation.
The next night I told her, okay, no funny business; we would just be friends. She seemed surprised, but then she settled in. We worked late into the night. I had taken ephedrine to study, as I often did, but something went wrong that night, and it just made me feel feverish and tired. I felt like I was going to pass out. I told her to go ahead and keep studying, that I was just going to lie down for a minute.
Riley woke me up later. All the lights were off. She was crawling into my bed naked. Afterward, we fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning, I had her sit on the couch while I played “What a Wonderful World” for her, the Nick Cave/Shane McGowan version. It began to snow, and we sat on the couch together and watched the snow come down in impossibly huge flakes.
After that, we spent every free minute together in my room. Riley was intelligent and caring, but cruelty was only ever one word away. When she was on top, I imagined her spine as a finely detailed poisonous millipede under my fingers, delicate as it was dangerous. I talked down about her to my friends, but I was crazy about her. She kept me on my toes.
“You make me feel like I’m in a movie,” she said one day.
“Like I’m Indiana Jones and you’re Willie, that dancer girl?”
“Why do you always get to be Indy?” she said.
We fought. My high school experience was a wound that hadn’t healed; hers had been a rosy crescendo. Riley had been one of the popular girls, a member of the court at the senior prom when she was just a sophomore. She had lost her virginity to her boyfriend Randy, three years older than she, on Valentine’s Day, after the Valentine’s Day Dance. “It was just perfectly romantic,” she told me with faraway eyes.
Randy was older, stronger, cooler, just all-round better, the boyfriend I could never be. His primacy in her heart was unquestionable as, shortly after he had joined the Marine Corps, he had been found dead. They declared it suicide, but Riley was convinced it was foul play. She spoke of him constantly, lovingly, and chastened me for sulking: I had nothing to worry about from him, he was dead, couldn’t I just appreciate what a great guy he had been?
One night, she related to me how she had been sexually abused as a child and then date-raped by one of Randy’s friends after a drunken campfire party after Randy had enlisted. If that weren’t hard enough for her sheltered, seventeen-year-old boyfriend to process, she then detailed how she had gone back home on her first break after entering Simon’s Rock and fucked her rapist.
“I just went in and took what I wanted. I raped him,” she told me, lying there in the dark.
I suspected that he didn’t see it that way, but I was quickly learning not to give voice to every thought I had around Riley.
I awoke one morning a couple of months into our relationship, dying for a piss. I heaved myself out of my bed and lurched to the bathroom in my boxer shorts. I stumbled to a stall, pulled my shorts down, put a hand up to steady myself over the toilet, then closed my eyes and let go.
I tried to reconstruct the events of the day before. I had started drinking at noon when I got out of class, then dropped two hits of acid, then drank a bottle of cough syrup, then smoked pot. I recalled not seeing double but seeing the world refracted many times over, as if I had the eyes of a dragonfly.
I felt that gratifying sense of relief you get when you pee, and I sensed warmth but I didn’t hear any sound. I opened my eyes. I was wearing a condom that had already ballooned to the size of a small cantaloupe with hot urine. I gasped and grabbed for it, and at that precious moment, it slipped off and hit the edge of the toilet with a splash.
Why had I been wearing a condom? I racked my brain while I tried lamely to clean myself up, then walked back into my room. Asleep in my bed was Anne, a girl from my acting class.
I lived my life in opposition to my father’s. Yet here I was, a weak, shitty man, cheating on my girlfriend as my dad had cheated on my mother. I had inherited all of his flaws and none of his strengths.
Riley took me back without forgiving me. After my infidelity, she seemed to love me more, or at least to want me more. But after a couple of drinks, she took great pleasure in twisting the blade. I took it: I had betrayed her.
Riley’s “come closer/stay back” froze me between what I felt was real love for her and my refusal to play the game. During the bickering before the divorce was finalized, my father had told my mother that he had never loved her. He had only said that he did because it was “appropriate.” For how many years and how many millions of times had he told that lie? Love had been tainted and abused, definitively ruined by my father, so the word was no good to me. I never said the words to Riley: I love you.
Finally, Gabe had enough. He caught a bus south to visit friends. We had failed. I hitched down to California to drop in unannounced on my father at his new home in Pleasanton, an idyllic inland city even the name of which I found despicable. I’d visited him a couple of times in different apartments over the last eighteen months, usually at my mother’s urging. Sometimes it was okay. I had apparently inherited his genetic aptitude for not talking about shit. He let me drink, and we ate a hell of a lot better than we did when I visited my mom.
But his new place was in a gated community. I knew the security guard wasn’t about to let me walk in with my pack, so I called and called from a payphone across the street: no answer. Hours after the sun went down, Dad still wasn’t home. I bought a bottle of generic NyQuil, slipped over the wall into his wealthy colony, chugged the cough syrup, and blacked out in the cedar chips between two carefully manicured hedges.
The sprinklers woke me the next morning. I started throwing u
p before I could even get out of my sleeping bag. Still, I took comfort in the thought that while all these pathetic drones around me were eating their breakfasts, I was losing mine.
I packed up my bedroll, shouldered my pack, and located my dad’s condo. The look of alarm on his sleepy face when he answered the door was priceless. Hey, Dad, it’s the prodigal son! Ya miss me?
When I landed in Colorado ten days later, I moved into the unheated, unfinished basement of the rundown duplex my mother was renting next to Tashina’s high school in Lafayette, a small town an hour’s bus ride away from the university in Boulder. The carpet smelled like cat piss. We didn’t have a cat.
I wasted a couple of days wandering around the lifeless town: a couple of subdivisions behind strip malls and big box stores on either side of the state highway connecting Longmont and Broomfield; a high school with a football field; a neglected old concrete-lined “reservoir” that had become solely a repository for goose shit. I’d told Riley in no uncertain terms that we weren’t going to carry on a long-distance relationship. I mean, look at what had happened to my mom and dad. But I missed her terribly. I demanded that my mother procure alcohol for me, then drank alone in my room, listening to Gallon Drunk and mooning over her.
I got a job as a fry cook at the local Sonic Burger drive-in for minimum wage, $4.25 an hour. I had to spend money on a pair of black polyester pants and a Sonic T-shirt before I even clocked in. What a scam. And the work, standing over a blazing hot grill, frantically flipping burgers for hours and hours while getting screamed at by the servers, till my hair was gritty with dried sweat, my hands, wrists, and forearms flecked with burns, my clothes saturated with grease, my feet swollen and aching, my back screaming. I remember shuffling the mile home after work, shell-shocked, then stripping off my clothes, too filthy to even bring inside, on the back deck. During dinner, I was so tired, I could barely talk. I fell asleep immediately after eating, without even taking a drink. Good thing—I had to wake up the next morning, pull my greasy clothes back on, and drag my tired ass back in for another day of the same.
I’d done hard labor before, chopping firewood and hanging sheetrock and carrying sixty-pound bales of hay up a ladder into a hayloft. I’d dug holes for underground water tanks so broad and deep that I’d had to yell for someone to pull me out. In those days, I slept well and rose early. My muscles would be sore but in a satisfied way, like our dogs after a hard run, grinning with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. The fatigue from cooking burgers eight hours a day was different. My whole body felt swollen, even my eyelids and lips. Shoveling dirt tore up your back and hands and arms, but it would make you bigger and stronger. Cooking would just wear me down like water pounding interminably on stones, my shoulders curling in, my back hunching, my chin descending slowly toward my chest.
Yes, I had drunk as much as humanly possible at Simon’s Rock, till my closet filled up with empties and my trash can stank continually of vomit, but I had also worked my ass off, waking up early to write papers or finish the assigned reading, drunk or high or coming down from the night before, my foul trash can always within reach. Had I endured all that just to get to this?
All our furniture had been sold, so I had nowhere to keep my clothes. On a day off, my mother and I cruised garage sales, looking for a dresser and a desk. The cheapest pieces we could find—dusty white particle-board units held together with plastic screws—were twenty or thirty bucks. Screw that—fifty bucks bought a lot of wine. I did my homework at the kitchen table and used pickle buckets from work as a dresser, which made my clothes reek. Fuck it, it’s not like my many friends were going to notice and taunt me.
I got promoted to night manager at Sonic Burger and began working six nights a week. Time off? For what? So I could lean on the chain-link fence behind our house and watch other boys my age—the Centaurus High football team—tackle and high-five each other, worried only about making varsity and getting laid? Thanks, but no. God, I had been so eager to escape the oppressive environment of my high school. I should have just faked it, or even capitulated entirely, played the game, submitted to the American dream of high school rah rah rah, a job at the auto body shop, then gradual acquiescence to sloth, despair, obesity, obscurity, alcoholism.
We had read Night at Simon’s Rock, Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of survival in Auschwitz during World War II. I recalled the sign mounted over the gates of Auschwitz, capital letters cut out of metal by imprisoned Jews: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.” Its English translation, “Freedom Through Work,” became my personal motto. I repeated it daily while scrubbing the hot, filthy grill with a wire brush, cleaning out the grease trap on the roof, or walking home, stinking and exhausted, in the middle of the night. Did I understand it was idiotic to dangerous to adopt a Nazi slogan as a mantra? Maybe. But the few things I enjoyed fell into the gray area between idiotic and dangerous.
In the fall, I started at the University of Colorado, “Ski U,” a party school known for its athletics, the criminal misbehavior of its fraternity brothers, its patchouli-and-blonde-dreadlocks poseur hippie vibe, and the egregious wealth of its mostly out-of-state student body. Classes were a joke. Many of my credits from Simon’s Rock—expensive credits, premium credits, blue-chip credits!—didn’t transfer, so I was stuck taking core curriculum classes in huge lecture halls where the greatest challenge was not falling asleep. All the film classes I wanted to take were held in the afternoon or evening hours when I had to work. I grudgingly changed my major to writing so I could keep my job.
Though Riley and I were officially broken up, we talked on the phone nearly every day and wrote each other long letters whenever time permitted. Her roommate was annoying, she adored her professors, it was sad being at Simon’s Rock without me. Ben White was getting weirder, getting worse. One night at a party at his house, a filthy squat with no heat or working plumbing, he told her a story about his friend in Florida who had set a girl on fire and buried her body in a swamp but never gotten caught. I felt the skin on my back prickle. I’d heard this story before. Ben trotted out this dark tale each time he was seducing a girl or just a new friend.
Was Ben after her? There had been revulsion in her voice when describing their encounter, but I knew that darkness fascinated her. I tried to warn her. I had nothing to worry about, she said; she would die before she’d let that creep touch her.
I loathed my new life. On a rare night off, I walked past a group of young men on my way to a punk show. They were talking and laughing, great teeth, great posture, their shoulders square under the high-thread-count cotton of their Oxford blues. They were America’s bounty, the future senators, the torch in Liberty’s hand, the power and the glory, amen. This, all of this, not just energy drinks and Natural Light and Greek Week and football scholarships, but the Golden Gate Bridge, the New York Stock Exchange, the highways, the power grid: it was for them. For them to use or ignore or destroy. For them, and not for me.
“Faggot,” one of them muttered, just loud enough for me to hear.
“Yeah,” I called over my shoulder, “I love cock. Come over here, and I’ll suck you off. You and all your buddies, best head you ever had.” And then ran for my life.
My father had been an outcast like me. When I came home crying after grade school one day, my mother had told me that Dad had been picked on too, that his mother had had to pick BB gun pellets out of his ass with a butcher knife. (Jesus, he’d even one-upped me in the bullying he had endured.) But I also knew my father was weak. If everyone you encountered was an asshole, wasn’t it more likely that you were the asshole?
Long before he’d flaked on us, I’d made up my mind to live in defiance of my father’s circumscribed life, fleeing persecution at home for persecution at work like a dog clipped to a clothesline, running frantically back and forth, wearing a rut in the lawn. My last semester at Simon’s Rock, a friend who lived across the hall had waded through the filth of my room and, with a “You need to read this,” thrown a book at me and wa
lked out: Women by Charles Bukowski. I was in pain, and Bukowski’s wounded, macho bluster made instant sense to me. Bukowski mapped the path to freedom: freedom from the horrors of working a corporate job, from kowtowing to people, from turning out like my father. Reading Bukowski, it seemed radically simple. A bellyful of bourbon was the answer. The trick was just not to run out.
I drank whiskey from a plastic bottle by myself at night in that cold basement, teaching myself Elvis and Johnny Cash songs on my father’s guitar, my shoulders, back, and feet aching from work. I drank sloe gin from a flask with the leathery old Native Americans on the bus to Boulder. I drank warm Budweiser before class, then berated my classmates for trying to bluff their way through a conversation on Lolita when they clearly hadn’t done the reading.
Sorely hungover on the bus back from class one day, my mind flashed to the jug of whiskey I had been nursing for a couple of weeks. Poisoned as I felt on that lurching bus, the thought of that bottom-shelf whiskey actually made my mouth water. I was an explorer; I had ventured deep into the caverns of a new world. But I had been careless, and I had brought something back with me—a malign parasite. I felt the skin on my neck pucker up. I can control it, I told myself, and tried to push the ugly thought away. But I was scared.
I had awkward, drunken sex with one of the carhops from Sonic, a girl I didn’t even like. I told Riley about it. It had meant nothing to me. Besides, we were broken up!
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 7
