I felt something break loose inside me. I was coming unwound. I dug in my cardboard box of clothes for another bottle of rum. When I raked from the bottom up, I unearthed a gallon Ziploc bag of seashells. I lifted the plastic bag out of the box and emptied it on the carpet in the moonlight.
The seashells were beautiful, of course, but also sinister. Loosely piled there, ridges gleaming between folds of shadow like wet human ears. I’d spent a whole afternoon walking around on the beach after a storm on St. John picking them up for Riley—tiny coiled snail shells, perfect miniature scallops, the pink, oval skeletons of black sea urchins. It all seemed so fucking useless now. I grabbed handfuls of them and threw them out Judah’s open window.
I needed Sam now. I called information and got the number for the Taj Mahal, Conor’s bar. Conor answered after about ten rings. He was slurring, and I could tell by his voice that he was surprised to hear from me. No, he said, Sam wasn’t there; he had shown up to get me but left when Conor told him he’d already dumped me in a cab. Conor asked me if I got home okay, but I hung up.
I called my mom in the Virgin Islands even though I knew it was long distance, even though I knew she was on vacation with Paul somewhere. I figured I would get Tashina, and she could give me the number where they were. I let it ring and then hung up just before the answering machine could pick up. I tried again, hung up again.
The third time I called, somebody picked up. I said, “Hello? Hello?”
When I called back, it was busy. Tashina must have just knocked the phone off the hook. I realized it was two hours later there and a school night.
I cried for a little while. Then I decided to call Riley’s mother. I knew Riley wasn’t going to be there, but I just wanted to talk to somebody who knew her. I dialed the number by heart. Her mom picked up the phone. She sounded sleepy. She always did when I called her in the middle of the night.
I said, “Hello? Is this Sandy?”
She sighed. “Hi, Mishka.”
“I’m sorry for calling, Sandy. Did I wake you up?”
“No, no, no, I was just falling asleep.”
That’s what people always say when you wake them up.
“I’m sorry, Sandy. I swear I won’t call again. I just wanted to make sure Riley was alright.”
Of course she was alright. I knew because I’d had a panic attack one morning after a night of Riley dreams, and I’d called her house and grilled her little sister’s babysitter.
“Oh, she’s fine. She got accepted to the Washington, DC, ballet, and so she’s out there. Do you want her number?”
“I know she doesn’t want to talk to me.” My voice started to crack a little bit. “I just wanted to make sure that she was okay.”
“How long has it been since you talked to her?”
“About two months.”
“Oh, Mishka, I’m sorry. I can’t make any excuses for her. When Riley doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t do anything. She was trying to get in touch with you, I know, but she didn’t know where you were.”
That was so much bullshit. She’d tracked me down before when she was drunk and lonely and tired of calling her other ex-boyfriend. She knew the number for information. She knew I was in Denver.
“Let me get your address,” Sandy said.
I gave her Sam’s address, my voice warbling the whole time: 1065 Gaylord Street—is this world completely void of dignity? Sandy wrote it all down. Or at least she acted like she was writing it down.
“She’ll get in touch with you, I’m sure.”
Then there was a little pause. We didn’t know what to say. Sandy was Riley’s mother; I was Riley’s crazy ex-boyfriend calling her house in the middle of the night again. I had seen Sandy about six months before, and we hadn’t had anything to talk about. We both loved Riley. Sandy had always been nice to me, or at least polite.
“I love her so much, Sandy.”
I was completely gone, bawling.
“I know, I know, Mishka. I’m sorry. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you.”
“I’m sorry, Sandy. I won’t call you again. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Mishka.”
I fell on the floor. I didn’t know where my mom was, Tashina wasn’t answering the phone, I couldn’t call Tatyana, I definitely couldn’t call my dad, Sam was gone, Riley was dancing for the Washington ballet . . . there was no one. I was crying pretty hard, I guess. My landlord banged on his ceiling, my floor. It was quiet hours after nine.
I won my own room only when someone else moved out, so I stacked my boxes in ungainly towers and made a nest of old blankets in the corner as I had no bed. My back hurt, but my back always hurt. Sam found me a job in a call center very much like the one that had downsized my mother. The guys talked about sports; the girls gossiped; everyone parroted jokes they’d heard on TV. I’d clawed my way through college to discover that the world was a high school.
Still, after my cooking and construction gigs, a cushy office job was a miracle. They paid you to sit around hungover all day! For the first time in my life, I had more money than I knew what to do with. We drank gloriously: Fat Tire, Blue Moon, Guinness, Mississippi Mud, gallons of Jameson, oceans of shitty red wine. Our landlord refused to turn on the heat, so as the temperature dropped, we found ourselves dressing up for sleep: coat, two pairs of socks, winter hat. I still didn’t buy a bed.
My life felt hunched around the space where Riley had been. My second year at Simon’s Rock, I got a palmar wart on the callus just below my index finger on my right palm. I picked at it. It grew. I picked at it. It grew. Finally, one night, I got a good hold on it with a pair of needle-nose pliers, took a deep breath, and ripped it out. A jagged sear of pain flashed through my hand and was gone. I looked down. Clamped in the pliers was what looked like a well-chewed piece of cinnamon gum. I glanced fearfully at my hand. There was a ragged hole in my palm, big enough that I could have stuck my pinkie finger in it. I stared at it, unable to look away. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Then, in an instant, the hole filled with blood, then overflowed. That was my October in Denver: the gaping hole, the horrifying absence, the moment before the blood comes.
Stumbling drunkenly out of the shower one morning, at an utter loss as to how I would make it through work in my condition, I came upon Conor, just home from his bartending shift, cutting lines of blow on the cover of the record player. Who, in good conscience, could turn that down? It would get me through the day anyway. The coke energized me enough to brave the chill and walk to work.
The first half of my shift was fine. God, I was helpful; I had never been so incredibly helpful in my life. Oh, no no no, thank you!
Lunch was a pratfall. I walked to the Subway where I ate each day. The counterperson made my sandwich without comment: a foot long roast beef on whole wheat with everything, extra banana peppers, extra jalapenos. I was coming down, a rougher reentry than I’d anticipated. My stomach twisted ominously.
Outside, the cold air in my face calmed my nausea. Just take a bite, choke a bite down, begin the grim process of forcing your body to run on food again. I opened the bag and the smell hit me before I could even get a piece of the sandwich out.
Some people fall to their knees before they vomit. This is poor technique. It’s easier to start out in a low crouch, like the position recommended for a plane crash. This angle maximizes the amount of product for your effort. Plus it’s easy to sink to your knees afterward if you’re feeling melodramatic. I held my tie over my shoulder like a pro as I bent over and wretched on the corner, just bile and water.
People crossed the street to avoid me. I wiped my mouth with the Subway napkins, looked around to make sure no one from work had seen me, then walked a block and sat down, leaving my mess for someone else to deal with. I learned it from watching you, Dad.
Around the corner, a skinny old dude was playing harmonica and singing about “my baby left me.” Riley was everywhere now that she was gone. I
began to cry.
The guy cut off in the middle of his song, got up, and sat next to me. I tried to stop crying, but I couldn’t. He patted me on the back.
“There, there, little brother. It’ll pass, it’ll pass.”
When I was cried out, I stood up and handed my sandwich off to the homeless guy. I knew I should empty my pockets for him, but I also knew I would need to drink later. Then I walked back to work. It just wouldn’t do to come back late from my lunch break.
When the landlord on Gaylord Street finally became too openly hostile for us to continue living there, we gave notice and agreed to band together to find another place to live. Then no one did anything. Mere days from our impending homelessness, a huge, unseasonal blizzard shut down the city so none of us could get to work. I worked the phone all day, schlepped around in the thigh-deep snow for hours, then spun an intricate web of lies: Conor was my current landlord; Judah’s girlfriend was my boss; his friend Mateo’s girlfriend, whom I had only met once, was a family friend of ten years, my character reference. By the end of the day, I had snatched our fat from the fire by finding a house bigger, nicer, and cheaper than our current atrocity. I was toasted articulately and then inarticulately by my roommates . . . and still I got stuck with the worst room, a lightless unheated concrete box in the basement, the Well of Misery. Fortunately, Mateo’s girlfriend kicked him out, and he took the other basement room. It’s nice to have company, even in hell.
Our request for our Gaylord Street security deposit elicited a vitriolic eight-page diatribe from our old landlord, threatening legal action if he ever heard from us again. We performed dramatic readings of it in the living room of our new house, quasi-musicals even, leaping off the furniture, cracking ourselves up. We swore drunkenly to preserve the letter forever. I lost it almost immediately.
I had been driving down to Boulder each week for my final class, a geography lecture, in the battered 1986 Nissan my mother had left for me. After a particularly rough night, I threw up blood on the university quad to the horror of some passing coeds. Fuck it; my father had bailed on paying tuition for my last semester, so at least it was my own money I was wasting. I was so weak on the drive home that several times I drifted dangerously close to the median before jerking the wheel. The next day, I canceled the insurance on my mother’s car and parked it in our garage. A banal car accident was not the death I wanted. I began taking the bus to Boulder for class. I slept through the Denver stop on the ride home once and was halfway back to Boulder when I woke up.
Winter came and, with it, darkness. I threw up constantly and lost weight. My eyes yellowed. Each night, the edge was clearly visible. One warm beer in the cardboard twelve-pack felt italicized: if I drink this beer, I will feel like death tomorrow. One swallow in the gallon jug of Carlo Rossi separated itself like a clot of oil: if I drink this swallow, I will throw up tomorrow. A shot of liquor in the bottom of a chipped glass glowed like it was radioactive: if I take this shot, I will puke tonight. I drank them all.
I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado that December. I didn’t bother picking up my diploma; I had to work. We celebrated with a keg, some coke, and a gift from Paul’s son Jesse, an oversmart stoner.
“You’re twenty years old. You just graduated college. I figure we’re at the moment of grace in your cerebral development where your brain has the optimal ratio of raw computing power to useful intellectual content. Perfect time for the brain-destroying power of protoxide of nitrogen,” he said, then handed me two boxes of cartridges of nitrous oxide and a handful of balloons.
The next morning, empty nitrous containers littered the house like shell casings. We labored to kill the keg while listening to the Oblivians and Hank Williams. Everyone in the house had gotten lucky except for the man of the hour, unconscious before midnight. But then I had been a reliable disaster with the ladies for a while. Apparently women weren’t attracted to morbid, weepy drunks? They were worse than fair-weather friends; women were just . . . emotional gold-diggers, the whole lot of them, I bitched to Sam. He shook his head, then put his face in his hands.
I wound up having three days off due to a scheduling change. No school, no work, money in the bank . . . I went on a bender, Absolut and Jameson and Cutty Sark and Bailey’s, vomiting repeatedly, barely eating for three days.
I awoke, gasping, in my bed. The frigid oblong of my room felt submerged, claustrophobic, and futile: a fish tank at the bottom of the ocean. What time was it? There was one small window in my room, four tiny panes tucked down a little well at the base of the foundation. Blocking that window—shutting out even the weak, timid pulse of sunlight that snuck in for a couple of hours each day—would make the darkness of my room complete. I kept meaning to tinfoil the glass and write on the foil in black permanent marker, one syllable on each pane, “FUCK | ING | HOPE | LESS.” But even getting a Sharpie and tinfoil together took more effort than I could supply.
The window was dark. Night. I listened carefully. There was no sound. Everyone was asleep.
When I made it to Colorado, I had devised The All-Encompassing Plan:
1. Graduate from College and Make Mama Proud. Do her justice so that, at least in that regard, all her sacrifices haven’t been for nothing. I had completed this phase, no small feat considering the cubic footage of alcohol I’d consumed my final semester. Hold your applause, please, hold your applause.
2. Do Something Incredible. This would be slightly more difficult. I had no idea what The Incredible Thing would be. Right now, getting some food down would be incredible, particularly if it stayed there. But The Incredible Thing had to be bigger, of course: something dramatic, explosive, brilliant. I had ruled out acts of violence and terrorism, major and minor—that was maybe the only thing I had learned at Simon’s Rock. Self-immolation was still on the table.
3. Become Successful. This most likely involved monetizing The Incredible Thing. Shit, I guess this step ruled out self-immolation, which was unfortunate. I knew of only three ways to get a large amount of money. One was armed robbery, but I couldn’t bring myself to do guns. Another was craftiness: cracking safes, counting cards, hacking computers, financial wizardry. With my shaking hands, physical dexterity of a three-legged camel with vertigo going downstairs on a pogo stick and roller skates, and track record of never having gotten away with anything ever? Nope. Lastly, big money could be generated by being outrageously lucky. Let’s not even kid about that one.
4. Get Revenge. I’d heard about the process of “making amends,” a part of the Twelve Steps wherein some sorrow-soaked sober souse would write sniveling apologies to everyone he had ever wronged in his life: mother, father, sisters, brothers, friends, bartenders, doormen, motel maintenance staff, every single woman who had ever had the misfortune of having any part of his body inside any part of her body, and so forth. The fourth and final phase of my great plan was an inversion of this process. I would come for everyone who had ever laughed at us: the kids who had mocked Tashina for her hearing aids or her glasses, the men who walked over her feelings and took her for granted; the flirtier, more confident girlfriends who had used or betrayed Tatyana, preying on her selflessness; every sneering neighbor, every haughty landowner who had ever condescended to my mother because she was working in the supermarket or cleaning his house. I would come for every bully, any bully, every man who had raped or traumatized or abused any of the numerous women I’d known who now lived in pain and fear; the torturers, anyone who had ever taken pleasure in creating pain in another. I would come for every single rich person in the world; every happy, unworried person in every coffee shop; everyone who had had it easy where we had had it hard. I would come for everyone, everywhere. It would take some planning. A pad of legal paper and one of those mechanical pencils would be a good first step. You know, make a list.
What day is it? Do I work tomorrow? I think I work tomorrow. Am I going to be sick if I sit up? I tried to feel down into my tummy without moving. Wow, I was wearing a T-s
hirt and socks and nothing else. My stomach felt hard and tight. Not good, but I wouldn’t be sick, at least not now. Nothing to throw up.
I sat up slowly and reached for the phone. My head felt like someone had broken a bottle inside it. I dialed time and temperature: “At the tone, the time will be 1:39 a.m., December 15, 1997.”
I had slept through the fifth anniversary of the shooting.
A couple of friends would have called, possibly my dad, probably Tatyana, definitely my mom. I checked voice mail.
Nothing. Nothing from my friends. Nothing from my family. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
During the day, I was generally okay. There were people around, and there were limits to how far off the rails you could go in the daylight. Sad, but okay. But at night, and especially alone at night . . .
I had described it to Judah as the Snuffleupagus of Despair. The Snuffleupagus of Despair was like Big Bird’s friend who only visited when there was no one else around, except totally different: terrible, horrible, terrifying, horrifying, isolation made flesh, hot breath that stank of cat urine, long shaggy hair that smelled like a dead wet dog washed up on the beach. To gaze upon the Snuffleupagus of Despair was to lose your mind; to touch it was to fold up inside yourself, asphyxiate in the cold molasses of your own loneliness, and disappear completely. Judah had laughed—we had both laughed there in the kitchen—but even then, laughing together in the sunlight, he understood, and it put fear into his eyes.
I had hidden some bottles around the house, you know, just in case. The pint in my sock drawer was gone. The pint in my desk drawer was gone. I pulled on some boxers and went upstairs and out into the screened-in porch, shivering violently. There, under one of the couch cushions was a pint of Captain Morgan. It was freezing cold. I took a huge, chilly pull off it even before I walked back inside. It tasted like Christmas and pancake syrup and poison.
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 10
