I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  I posted and reposted her ads all day long, fuming in silence. The instant my mother went to sleep, I railed thick, chalky lines of Opana and chugged her box wine, as I had when I was a kid, then stumbled around her house, gawping at her belongings, as enraged as I was impotent.

  When my mom accidentally threw away my hoarded Xanax, I pitched such a tantrum that she not only went through the trash looking for it, she then begged some Valium for me the next day off a girl she knew from work. Wow, I thought, I’ve even got Mom scoring drugs for me now.

  We got drunk playing Scrabble one night, and my mother expressed concern that I was going to kill myself.

  “Mom, I promised when I was a kid, and I promise again,” I said. “As long as you continue to live, so will I.”

  “And when I’m gone?”

  “Well, you won’t be around to bust my chops for breaking a promise, will you?”

  She smiled at me sadly. “Well, I plan on living to be ninety, so you’ll be sixty by then. You may be ready to go.”

  “We can catch the same bus.”

  “Two for one. Kids ride free.”

  We made light of it in the moment, but it depressed the hell out of me. My own mother seemed resigned to the fact that, best-case scenario, she and I would be kicking off at the same time.

  When I got back to New York, I returned to that living death, the working life. I begged my way into a job at another construction company in Queens as office manager, a position with more responsibility than the gig I’d previously been fired from. My lack of qualification for the job was only outmatched by my lack of desire to actually perform it.

  After a straight month of subpar performance, I got bumped back to a tiny, unheated, windowless office flooded with an inch of standing water. In the move, I found a file cabinet drawer of expired cough syrup samples. Anything cherry-flavored makes me gag from drinking too much cough syrup as a teenager, but these were grape flavored. They got me through a couple of idle weeks.

  High on morphine one night, I got a call from the iconoclast comedian Doug Stanhope. He’d heard my songs, he said as I listened in stoned disbelief, and he was a fan. He brought me out on the road, opening for his bleak “fetish comedy” with my songs of drunken-hearted despair. I played to the biggest crowds of my life. People started clapping before I’d even finished—clapping for me. I churned out a couple more bleak, druggie dispatches for the New York Press to accolades from my friends and even a couple of fan emails. I sold hundreds of dollars’ worth of T-shirts and CDs; I took photos with fans; I signed autographs. People picked fights with me; one guy even took a swing at me. I’d been waiting for this my entire life.

  These occasional debauched weekends on the road made work bearable, and they made it unbearable. I imagined Stanhope as a foulmouthed, mushroom-gobbling Tinker Bell, silently sprinkling some powder of indeterminate origin in my hair as I hunched over a desk, then whisking me off to a depraved, hedonistic Neverland of free drinks, free drugs, applause and adoration and autographing boobs. Too soon, I was neatly deposited back in front of my hated computer monitor, my pen caddy, my monthly desk calendar, always coming down from something.

  One of my most cherished moments was getting booed at the end of my set in Seattle, only to have Doug bound up on stage and come to my defense: “Hey, Fatty! Yeah, you, the date rapist in the back, booing my friend. What do you do for a living, file shit? Mishka’s a fucking artist, man.” The crowd roared with laughter. My chest burned with pride. Days later, I was back at work, filing shit. It was funny, funny in a way that made me want to jam my fingers in the paper shredder so I could never work again.

  Finally, my chaos alienated even Stanhope. He had been a little thrilled when he found out I was every bit the drunken mess my songs promised. Had that thrill diminished when they held back some of his pay to cover a table I couldn’t recall breaking? Or when the club had to call the cops in Portland? Or was that Tacoma? Was it when I had to retain a criminal lawyer? Or was it just the same thing that had plagued me my whole life, that I was almost good enough but not quite?

  After one particularly chaotic trip, the show offers stopped coming. Then Stanhope stopped calling. Then he stopped picking up my calls. Then he had a new opener. The carnival never stopped, but if you were careless, it left town without you. Doug was going on with his life. I was left to deal with mine.

  My roommate Esteban worked as a dispatcher for a gay escort service and did phone sex from the apartment. I felt for him. Poor fucker was surrounded by sex but unable to get any for himself. In the nearly three years we had lived together, he had never had a dude over. The muffled human sounds that occasionally seeped out of his room—were those pornography or him crying? I couldn’t decide which I found more repellant: the thought of my morbidly obese roommate masturbating to gay porn or a human being feeling an honest emotion in such close proximity.

  Esteban ate terribly—White Castle and TV dinners and heaping plates of fried chicken, plantains, greasy rice and beans—and his weight steadily increased. Esteban blacked out on the toilet, naked, his long black hair hiding his face. Esteban vomited in the bathtub and didn’t clean it up. Esteban locked himself out one night, so he smashed a window in order to get back in, badly cutting his arm. Another night, he showered drunk, then opened the wrong door on his way back to his room and fell down two flights of stairs. Our eighty-year-old landlady, Doris, found him at the base of the stairs, naked, bleeding, and barely conscious.

  Esteban wasn’t all bad. He was friendly to the ragged parade of sad women trooping in and out of my half of the apartment. Like me, he sang in the shower. My sympathy for his situation was not entirely destroyed by having to live with him. We had a kind of grim understanding, like characters in a Beckett play: each of us deserved the mute horrors of the other.

  Bleak as my life was, I knew I had to succeed at my job. But work was impossible. I was useless for hours of the workday, sweating and nauseated and lightheaded. My mother had sacrificed so much for me. It was time for me to sacrifice for her. Just be the good son, I told myself, and get it together.

  I finally did some research on my magic bullet, Opana. It was a Schedule II synthetic opiate more powerful than Oxycontin, morphine, and pharmaceutical heroin. Indeed, Opana was so treasured by junkies and other opiophiles that it had been pulled off the market in the 1970s after a string of pharmacy robberies. In the 1989 Gus Van Sant movie Drugstore Cowboy, Opana was the pharmacy bandits’ drug of choice. A commenter on an opiate message board wrote, “I’ve been shooting heroin for 27 years and I’ve never had anything like this.” What had I gotten myself into? I would kick it, cold turkey.

  Removing painkillers from your life means inserting pain. My back knotted, then seized. I writhed my sheets into wet vines at night, gulping handfuls of Advil and Aleve, unable to sleep. Each night that passed, I grew more and more exhausted but somehow never got so tired that my body could take the sleep it needed. I felt possessed, like my skeleton was writhing under my flesh. I was visited so often by phantoms—a hanged man; an impossibly tall faceless man in a dark robe; the skeleton of a child; a dancing, empty dress; a drowned twelve-year-old boy, naked except for a dripping hooded sweatshirt—that I half convinced myself that my room was haunted.

  The pressure I put on myself to succeed at my job failed to motivate me to work hard. It only made me hate myself when I couldn’t force myself to try. My boss threw money at me, but I couldn’t be paid to care. The nihilist in me rose up, and I decided to see how long I could go without doing any actual work, trying to make my situation completely unbearable in hopes that something would happen, anything. Finally, I made it through an entire day without doing a single work-related thing. Nothing happened. I quit in disgust.

  The day before a December show with Rumanian Buck, a band I’d started with Aaron and Chen, my two most constant friends, I swung by the Christmas party at Pianos for “just one beer.” I progressed rapidly, from beer to shots of Jameson, to bumps of
coke, to drinking late into the morning with the metal security gate pulled down, to a near-fistfight with a cab driver who refused to take me over the bridge into Brooklyn. I glanced at the clock in my room when I finally shuffled in. My “just one beer” had concluded at 11:55 the following morning, fourteen hours and over $120 later.

  I woke up in the early afternoon, still drunk, unable to get back to sleep. I kept drinking. It was the only way I was going to make it through the show that night at Santo’s Party House.

  I took one of those big twenty-milligram Adderalls once I got to the club. Just before we went on, I snorted the blow still in my jeans pocket from the night before. Remaining upright was a challenge if I stood in one place, but as long as I kept moving, I was okay.

  The show was fine. It’s not like it was my first time playing fueled by chemicals alone. Chen’s guitar was too loud, but it covered up any changes I may have muffed.

  Afterward, Chen threw me the keys to his van. He was wasted and going home with some girl. Fine, I was okay to drive. Or at least more okay than usual.

  When I went outside to bum a cigarette, a girl with pale skin and pale blue-green eyes was leaning on a rail, drawing angrily on a Parliament. Her hair was bleached so white it was nearly gray, trailing down to the middle of her back like mist. She’d been at one of our other shows, chasing Aaron around, shitfaced. I’d stared at her tight jeans and thought, I deserve that girl.

  She turned her eyes up at me when I walked outside.

  “You’re hot,” she rasped.

  “You’re hot,” I dumbly returned.

  She blew out a lungful of smoke.

  “You wanna go?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  She turned to a friend of mine, who was standing next to her.

  “Is he a rapist?”

  “He’s never raped me,” my buddy grinned.

  That satisfied her. She threw down her cigarette, stamped it out, and looked at me expectantly.

  “One sec,” I said. I walked back in the club, grabbed my jacket, and threw the keys to the van at Aaron. They hit him in the chest and fell to the floor.

  “Tag. You’re it.”

  He looked at me, then down at the keys on the floor.

  “Aw, fuck, man, come on, I can’t—”

  A moment later this girl and I were in a cab, headed back to my place. When I asked her name, she lifted her head from my crotch to answer, “Oksana.”

  Oksana peeled her clothes off the minute we got into my apartment. She climbed up into my loft bed and laid there, full, firm breasts and a taut, muscular body. I felt like I was staring at a pile of amphetamines: I knew that it would ruin my life, and I could not wait to get started.

  When I couldn’t manage anything even remotely resembling an erection, she mocked me. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she said, flicking my useless cock, shriveled like some frightful war relic.

  Later, she wept raggedly and spilled a sorrowful tale. A week after her father died of cancer, her brother had committed suicide, and she had found his body. Her fiancée had died a year previously from a drug overdose. Now her mother was dying of cancer. It seemed unreal, so much grief in one short life. I wouldn’t have believed her story had I not heard stories to rival it.

  It had clearly taken a toll on her. It was eerie watching her flip from coquettish to enraged to weeping to laughing hysterically, like a TV changing stations when someone is sitting on the remote. I couldn’t make sense of all that loss—no one could—but maybe I could distract her for a minute, make her laugh? God knows I didn’t want to be alone.

  In the morning, I came to my senses. I could not tangle with her again. She was damaged. I mean, we all were. This world chewed you up. Especially women. But something about Oksana was different. I was like wet matches, but she was like wet dynamite.

  She was a sweet girl, I told her, with a lot going for her, but we should go our separate ways. I wouldn’t be good for her. She laughed, then pouted, but eventually she left. My self-preservation skills were finally getting better.

  Six weeks later, I was still waking up to Oksana. I avoided her, ignored her texts, calls, and emails. I dodged her at my band’s shows, hiding behind mailboxes and potted plants like some soused private inspector. But Oksana was everywhere I went, not just shows my bands played but every show I went to, brash and flirty in one of those dresses where it’s obvious the girl is naked underneath, eye-fucking me while carefully writhing a nipple free from the top of her dress.

  When I quizzed her as to why, in a city of nearly 9 million people, she had glommed on to a penniless problem drinker with no interest in her, she couldn’t explain her fascination with me. When I politely rejected her, she sniffled into her wine. Then one of those three ghosts she’d summoned that first night—brother, father, lover—would rematerialize. Tonight was her brother’s birthday; it was the anniversary of her father’s death; it was the anniversary of the wedding she’d never had, she’d had a horrible vision of her fiancée’s dead body in a dream. The cancer had finally killed her mother, and, no, she didn’t want to talk about it, but she couldn’t stand to be alone, not tonight.

  To resist her now was to court disaster. She would flip out, screaming. She’d throw glasses, throw punches. She’d demand to see the club’s manager and make insane accusations. Without a doubt, Oksana was crazy. Not kooky or offbeat or eccentric—crazy, like slash-your-tires, stab-you-with-a-broken-bottle, burn-your-fucking-house-down crazy. Of course, the only quality that eclipsed her mental instability was her physical beauty. God, she looked amazing, hair and skin so white it appeared to luminesce in the darkness of my room, illuminated only by the glow of the digital numbers on my hated alarm clock, her body so long and narrow but still curvy and muscular, like a pale serpent. Poisonous, of course.

  But those calves, the calves of a high school track star . . . and the first time I stuck my hand up her dress, she was soaking wet. Her eyes, intense and mercurial blue-green, like absinthe, one of them looking right at you: clocking, measuring, thinking, and understanding. And the other one in some fucked-up parallel universe—Cocainia—untouched by reason, logic, reality, or a single word of warning that came out of my mouth.

  Each time I encountered her, I coolly assessed that sleeping with her even once had been a mistake. Then I made a mental list of the specific ways in which sleeping with her again would tragically compound that mistake. Then I got shitfaced and took her home.

  My loneliness was so intense, it was like a physical affliction. Disappearing into her body was the quick fix that made the condition worse. As neat a trick as it was to feel lonely in a crowd, it was some next-level shit to feel alone while you were inside someone else. She had accused me once of wanting to fuck her doggie-style in order to pretend she was someone else. I wanted her facing away so I could pretend I didn’t exist.

  Every time I woke up next to her, I’d hate myself for my weakness, for my willingness to drag others down with me, and I’d resent her for allowing it. Demeaning as that pattern of attraction and repulsion was for me, it must have been baffling and exquisitely painful for her.

  My mother was back in the Virgin Islands, as she had free lodging with the owners of the property she’d managed the first time she’d fled the country and her hard luck. I bought a ticket for a three-week trip with my diminishing savings. Not cheap, but it’d be worth it to see my mother, dry out, make a break from Oksana, and dodge a couple of weeks of the miserable Brooklyn winter.

  St. John was gorgeous. The weather was divine. We were broke. God fucking damn it, Mom and I were always broke. My daily chore was to harvest all the green papayas and ripe coconuts I could find on our side of the island. Eggs with fried shredded green papaya for breakfast; a can of tuna and a coconut for lunch; stuffed green papaya or green papaya lasagna for dinner. Jesus, canned tuna and eggs, the protein of poverty, every day of my pathetic life. We even went chicken hunting one day, giggling together, trying to snare one of the bir
ds that had gone feral on the island with the long hooked pole I’d made to reach the mangos on the tops of the trees. All we got for our troubles were some funny looks from the local West Indians.

  My mother and I alternated sleeping in the one available bed—a dilapidated old mattress with springs sticking into your back—and on the hardwood floor on a cushion from a deck chair that had been the dog’s bed until she died.

  Dry out? After years of rampant inflation, the price of local rum had risen to the princely sum of $4 a bottle—cheaper than orange juice. Alcohol wasn’t sinful; it was sound financial planning, cheaper and more transporting than food. St. John may have been the worst place in the world to dry out, but at least I had finally made the break from Oksana.

  I hadn’t been back in New York for an hour before we were back in bed together. Jesus, I wasn’t even drunk. We had sex twice. After the second time, she cried. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I told her for the umpteenth time that we had to stop this, now and forever. It wasn’t good for me. It was very bad for her. She shouldn’t prostrate herself before any man, least of all me. Finally, she seemed to understand.

  I locked my apartment door behind her, then walked over to the window to make sure she had actually left the building. I didn’t know whether to feel sympathy or contempt for her frenzied attempts to pump hope into something so obviously hopeless. Oksana, it’s a dusty fiberglass skeleton, like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie; no amount of CPR is going to bring it to life. I pitied Oksana, but pity wasn’t love. If anything, pity was the opposite of love.

  I crawled back into my bed and curled up in relief. Felt like a cold was coming on. I’d try to sleep in hopes of feeling better before my door shift in a few hours.