The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  The waiter nods.

  “Then here’s what let’s do. You tell him to take that broccoli and steam it with a little garlic and olive oil and whomp it together in a bowl.”

  The waiter shuffles off.

  “People talk about bingeing for a couple of days, a week. Mine went on for years. My drug of choice was “whaddaya got.” And if anything stood between me and it—let’s just say I never lost. Only tried heroin once, thought, Meh. This is making me tired. What’s the point? I did everything else, boy. The night you were conceived, I was tripping on acid. That might explain a few things, don’t you think?” He throws little daggers with his eyes.

  I say nothing.

  “Eight years ago today—your eleventh birthday—I said enough and dragged myself to the twelve-thirty AA meeting in Rye. If you’d bothered to talk to me . . . See, all these years, you haven’t had a clue that I know what the fuck time it is.”

  Looking around the room, I see straight lips and lifeless eyes on everyone from Hazelden. MJ’s elbows are propped on the table, his chin on his fist. Steve is staring into space. I finally spot Chessa leaning against the wall by the bathrooms.

  “Uh, I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “By all means. There’s plenty more when you get back.”

  Chessa slowly backs down the alcove toward the ladies’ room. I follow. Our lips are about to connect when her mom yells from across the restaurant. “Chessa, your food is here!”

  I jump over the threshold. My heart is racing.

  “Did they see us?”

  “Not a chance, dude,” she says, squeezing my arm. “How’s it going?”

  I grunt.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. You?”

  “It would have been better if you’d gotten here a minute ago. I would’ve fucked your brains out and given you a big hug. In that order.”

  Dinner is on the table when I return. With a mouthful of food, the sober vegetarian monster brings up the cherry tree outside my childhood home. “That was part of why your mother loved that house,” he says. “Remember what happened to it?”

  I remember the long pruning shears he used on the tree. I remember Mom asking him to stop when the tree was full, lush, and alive. And I remember her begging him to stop as it was slowly reduced to a stump.

  “Dave, do you remember what happened to that tree?”

  “It died?”

  “Know why?”

  I think, Yes, you fucking asshole. You killed it. I open my mouth and a confused no comes out.

  “It died because your mother refused to let me do what needed to be done so it could live. That’s always been the problem. She knows everything, and I’m as smart as a five-pound bag of potatoes. I wasn’t about to go to war with her over a tree, but if she thinks she knows a better way to save your life and she wants to duke this one out, she’ll find out what I’m made of.”

  The waiter comes with the bill and Dad takes out his wallet—a big gold paperclip from Tiffany—a gift from Mom before they were married. He separates a crisp hundred-dollar bill from a fat wad and lays it on the table.

  “When you leave here at the end of the month, you’ll bunk with me and get a job. Doesn’t matter what. If somebody with a pile of dead horses wants to pay you to dig ditches, you do it. Your mommy and your grandfather didn’t do you any favors, making your life so easy that you never had to go out and fend for yourself. You’ll re-enroll in college somewhere local. And go to at least two AA or NA meetings a day, every day, and work the steps. When you get to the eighth and you’ve got a list of people you harmed and you’re ready to make amends, I’m more than willing to accept your apology for the ways you’ve harmed me.”

  Dad takes a sip of water and crunches an ice cube as if to punctuate the point. My hands turn to fists under the table.

  “Do you know how I spent my fortieth birthday?”

  “We went to a Mets game.”

  “After I dropped you and Daniel off, I went back to my house and sat on the couch with a loaded pistol in my mouth. Know why I didn’t pull the trigger?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “You and Dan. Without me, how would you two grow up to be men?”

  The van is silent on the ride from dinner to the Marriott. After the parents file out and we get back on the road, Pete twists the volume knob on the radio. A commercial for a discount mattress store plays.

  Rain splatters on the windows as we coast down a suburban street.

  “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Pete says, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Don’t recall a dinner where anybody’s folks left with smiles on their faces.”

  The van has three rows of benches. Doug and MJ in the middle, then Phil and Steve. Chessa and I are in the back. Alone. She leans forward and asks Pete to take the long way home.

  “Scenic route it is. Nice night for a drive.”

  The mattress commercial ends, and “Lightning Crashes” by Live begins. I wasn’t crazy about this song or the band before. Right now, it’s perfect. Chessa’s fingers inch their way up my thigh. I take her cold, sweaty hand and give it a light squeeze.

  Sometimes it’s hard to separate fact from my father’s hyperbolic bullshit. At four in the morning, I’m still awake, thinking he was telling the truth at dinner.

  After the divorce, he moved to a small house in Port Chester, fifteen minutes and another world away. The men in his neighborhood wore gold chains with Italian horns. They nursed bottles of Michelob Light and looked quizzically at rusted, tireless cars on cinder blocks on their front lawns, scratching their heads with dirt-caked fingernails. In their presence, my lower-upper-class Jewish father transformed into a caricature, affecting a nonspecific accent as he told stories of growing up in a studio apartment in the Bronx. It was fiction—he was raised in a large, single-family home in an upscale suburban New Rochelle neighborhood.

  More than once, I heard Dad insinuate that he was the subject of multiple FBI investigations. Why would the feds be interested in a guy who owned a large paint manufacturing company? He always carried a gun to work—a revolver in a vest holster—and kept a rifle or two in the closet and a handgun in his briefcase, wide open, on his desk. I never touched any of them.

  When I finally summoned the courage to ask him why he packed such heat, he said, “Let me put it to you this way: if the other guy has a gun and you don’t, guess who’s gonna get shot?”

  I clench my eyes shut and try to force myself to sleep. Will my body ever learn to shut down without dope? Will my brain ever shut up? I hit the back of my head against the wall next to my bed. Not too hard. It doesn’t hurt but it’s not pleasant. I do it again. Harder. Again. Harder. Again. Harder. My roommate in the bed next to me sits up. An outside floodlight illuminates his face. I see concern in his eyes.

  “Uh, Dave, are you head-butting the wall?”

  “My bed at home is bigger and, um, it’s in the middle of the room and . . .”

  A little before six, I get up and go to the smoking area. Fresh snow covers every surface. Steve is on the bench, blowing perfect smoke rings, poking his finger through the holes. He says his parents gave him a choice: go to a halfway house or get cut off when his time here is up.

  “Nancy’s pimping this place in West Palm Beach,” he says. “And she wants me to go on Prozac.” He takes off his Blackhawks hat, runs a hand through his close-cropped hair, and kicks snow from the treads of brand-new Nikes his mom shipped last week via Federal Express overnight priority.

  “Did you give her the ‘antidepressant double standard’ speech?”

  “She went fucking ballistic.” Steve raises his voice an octave and imitates Nancy. “‘Steven, please tell me you understand the difference between drugs and medicine.’ I go, ‘Sure, Nancy. Prozac’s a bunch of chemicals, and dope’s all natural. But it’s illegal because back in the day, some white dudes in San Fran complained about white women sleeping with the Chinese guys who owned the opium dens. And coke’s illegal b
ecause in the 1920s, they thought Black men on blow were impervious to bullets.’”

  “The War on Drugs has to be unconstitutional, right?” I say. “All that stuff in the Declaration of Independence about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  “Think you’ll stay clean after this?”

  “I don’t know. I hate all the hiding and lying and risks and everything but I can’t imagine going the rest of my life without dope. You?”

  “Are you kidding? First chance I get, I’m scoring.”

  During breakfast, the parents show up and stand in the back of the dining room, whispering. I imagine them at the Marriott earlier this morning: crowded around a small table, Styrofoam plates with cold scrambled eggs and turkey sausage, comparing notes about their fubar kids. My father undoubtedly dominated the conversation.

  Nancy comes to my table. “When you’re through, swing by my office for a powwow with your dad.”

  I wait for her to leave with the parents before getting up. To buy more time, I run downstairs to pick up a notebook in my room and bump into Chessa in the hallway. She lifts her shirt for half a second—small, beautiful breasts, hard nipples, a ring in the left.

  Dad is in midsentence when I walk into Nancy’s office. She motions for me to sit in the chair next to him, facing her desk. “Somebody had to be the grown-up for Dave and Daniel. No rules, no accountability, no responsibilities.” Wiping invisible tears, he turns to me. “It’s unforgivable, what your mother did to you.”

  Nancy says, “Bob, how many times have you been married?”

  “Three.”

  “And how many kids?”

  “Four.”

  “So two with Robin and—”

  “Yes, but Dave and Daniel have always been my top priority. All their lives, I’ve never missed a school play or a Little League game.”

  That statement would be accurate if by “never” he meant “usually.”

  Nancy thumbs through a stack of pamphlets. “While you’re here, we ought to talk about aftercare. We have a national network of facilities that specialize in helping people in Dave’s position.”

  Dad reaches over and nudges me in the shoulder. “I tried to klaboodle a soccer ball over your head, but I clocked you in the bizonga by mistake. You were just a little nipper, maybe three, at Harvey and Alice’s house. Blood starts pouring down your face and you just went down like kapow! Your mother’s running around, screaming like a lunatic. ‘What’d you do? What’d you do? Oh my God, you killed him!’ I knew you were fine.”

  “Our facility in West Palm is probably the best option,” Nancy says, passing a brochure to him. “Before I do any legwork, are there any financial considerations?”

  “I just want my sonny boy back, so here’s what let’s do. You pick the place and send me the bill. What’s the point of money if you don’t use it at a time like this?”

  “I was hoping you’d call,” Mom says. “How’s it going with your father?”

  “He said he was a monster drug addict. Did you know?”

  “Oh, David, I’m so sorry.”

  “You knew.”

  “I knew he did drugs. I didn’t know he was a monster drug addict. I never knew where he was or what he did or . . . I remember one day when you were a baby, we came home from shopping and he was snorting coke in the kitchen.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “No, because I couldn’t stand being lied to. He wasn’t a good husband or father, and I knew it. Even after all this time, I hate him with a passion.”

  I fixate on that phrase as Mom goes on a tirade. My parents once were in love. Now they’re in hate. At least they have that in common.

  “What kind of piece of shit says he’ll pay for his kid’s college and then doesn’t, and you find out when you show up on the first day and he says he can’t afford it, and meanwhile, he’s driving around in a goddamn Ferrari?”

  “You’ve told me that you knew you were going to leave when I was a baby, so why’d you wait until I was four?”

  “I stayed because I wanted you to have a brother or sister. My worst fear was that if something happened to me, you’d only have him.”

  eleven

  Phil shows up to group in tears. His mom’s insurance provider refuses to cover more time as an inpatient. He has to move back in with his parents and drive here from St. Paul every day.

  I tell him, “Think of it as commuting. Your job is to get sober.”

  “Fuck you, Dave. You don’t take anything seriously.”

  “Perfect segue for today’s topic,” Ron says, patting Phil’s shoulder. “Rage is normal and natural, but you need a healthy release.” He asks what makes us enraged and how we deal with it.

  A new girl says her parents make her angry, and she takes it out on a dog-shaped pillow. A new guy hates himself more than anything and punches walls. Alex is enraged by everything and shoots semiautomatic firearms at cans (and possibly squirrels—I can’t tell if he’s kidding).

  “Dave? Batter up.”

  “I don’t really experience rage. When I was younger, I saw the way my mom reacted to my father and brother’s random acts of destruction and I decided not to—”

  “Let me stop you right there, Dave. Rage is a feeling. We can work with our higher power on how we deal with our feelings, but we don’t get to decide how we feel. You see what I’m getting at, right? Let’s try again. Dave. Batter. Up.”

  “I smashed a lot of Matchbox cars when I was eight or nine.”

  “Could you give us something a little more recent?”

  “I broke a pair of glasses at an open house my mom took me to, when she first started talking about selling the house I grew up in. I might’ve been eleven. It was at a new condo development. The place was empty except for a stack of fliers about the unit and a pair of glasses on a windowsill in the kitchen. My mom and I were with this realtor lady. She got all buddy-buddy with Mom the second we got there—took her by the arm and showed us around, talking about square footage and closet space and Jacuzzis. Upstairs, in one of the kids’ bedrooms, she got in my face and said, ‘Someone would be a very lucky boy to live here, don’t you think?’ When she and Mom went to the master suite, I said I wanted to go back downstairs and check it out again. She was like, ‘Why, certainly.’”

  “Did you know you were going to break the glasses beforehand?”

  “Oh yeah. It was premeditated. I went straight to the kitchen and grabbed them. I folded the temples back and forth the way you break a paper clip. Once they snapped off, I popped out the lenses and stomped on them.”

  “Get caught?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’d you do with the broken pieces?”

  “At first, I put everything in my pockets. Then I put them back on the windowsill.”

  “So you wanted to get caught.”

  “I didn’t want to—I stopped because I was worried about getting caught.”

  “Then why’d you put the glasses back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you want to move to the condo?”

  “I didn’t want to move anywhere.”

  “Did you tell your mom that?”

  “No.”

  At dinner, Steve says he chose the halfway house in West Palm Beach. We’re alone at the table, staring down piles of beef stroganoff on plastic plates. I try to cheer him up by pointing to the Heimlich maneuver poster on the wall by the kitchen, an illustrated instructional guide.

  “If the words were in a language you didn’t understand and somebody told you it was about fully clothed anal sex, you’d believe it.”

  Steve slurps a limp noodle. “Sorry. I’m a little cranky.”

  “That’s a feeling. Ron just told me feelings can’t be controlled.”

  “You’re just learning that now?”

  I affect an exaggerated infomercial announcer’s voice. “Addiction? Feelings? Some people call them hard to manage. At Hazelden, we call them diseases. Although you
’re completely fucking powerless, our imaginary friend, God, has the serenity you need to change the things you can’t accept and accept the things you can’t change.”

  “Sounds like Ron got you all kinds of riled up today in group.”

  I recap the session. Steve cringes. “I loved my Matchbox cars. You smashed yours?”

  “I pretended they belonged to people I hated and dropped rocks on them.”

  “Four-wheel voodoo dolls. How long did that go on?”

  “One day, I demolished this blue station wagon—same color as my neighbors’ car, the Kennedys. Married parents living in the same house. I couldn’t stand them. The next morning, my mom told my brother and me that Marney, the mother, dropped off Sarah—my age—at dance class and then she, the baby, and Peter—my brother’s age—were in an accident. Peter and Marney were killed. It was awful. My brother was crying. He said, ‘Peter was my best friend. I’ll miss him.’ I never smashed another car.”

  Nancy enters the room, her eyes narrowing as she approaches me. She says we need to talk after lecture and then gets behind the podium and introduces tonight’s topic: the Thirteenth Step—an unofficial term for newcomers who are preyed upon, sexually, by program veterans.

  Lauren, the speaker, identifies as an addict-alcoholic—cross-addicted. Twirling her curly hair nonstop, she tells her story: divorced parents, physical and psychological abuse, running away, turning to drugs. Between minor bouts of nervous laughter, she recalls multiple arrests for theft, solicitation, possession, and a rock-bottom epiphany that led her to an outpatient rehab.

  “I started working the steps, going to meetings. There was this guy—fifty maybe. He invited me to supper and asked to be my sponsor. A little flirtatious, but I said okay and went to his place and . . . that’s when it happened.

  I thought recovery was about staying clean, but I realized after six months went by and I was still going to his place, that I hadn’t begun to work on myself. If a man wasn’t showing me affection, it was like I didn’t exist.”

  When Lauren finishes, the room fills with applause. MJ cuts through the stampede. He whispers, “I saw you and Chessa in the van last night.” Between the low volume and his Southern accent, I can’t tell if he’s congratulating or accusing. Before he says another word, Nancy is in our faces.