Only white people scoff.
“I know. How do you think I found you? Personal information in a Facebook group? Really? Plus, appeals never work.”
“Yeah, well. Let’s hope for the sake of you and your plans that it doesn’t. Because I’ve got plans of my own for the place, and those plans don’t include you or whatever the hell the city has planned.”
Plans plansplansplansplanswtftorreyplansplans—
“I see,” he says.
We’re both quiet a second, neither willing to concede until—“Torrey!”—someone else calls my name. I hear Kiana exhale a sigh of relief behind me, like she just couldn’t wait for this exchange to be over.
I flash a toothy smile at Mr. Dick, adjust the glasses on my nose, and feign confidence with all the bravado I’ve gathered in my eighteen years as a Black male on this planet.
“Duty calls,” I say.
He hands me his business card. And I take it because I am a moron.
“See you soon,” is all he gives me back before he walks away.
That oily, scummy, Russian mob–looking ass headass is going to push me over the edge. I feel it already.
“Torrey!”
But I pack all that away—just like I always do, just like I’m good at—and focus on the next fire that needs putting out: the amount of Psych 101 catch-up discussion-board posting I’m in for.
12.
One of the reasons I decided to go to school here in San Francisco is because of a woman called Patricia McKenzie.
Patricia McKenzie is the fifty-six-year-old mother of one. Patricia McKenzie worked as a registered nurse for twenty-two years. Patricia McKenzie was stealing prescription drugs from her employer for half that amount of time.
Patricia McKenzie is in a medically induced coma and has been for five years.
I was thirteen when it happened. I knew she was sick long before she did. The pill bottles, the mood swings, the desperation. Not even the amount of love she tried to smother me with could disguise that. But still, she loved her medical meth more. More than me, more than her job and her family. More than anything. And I was okay with that because as much as she could give anyone—she gave me the most of her.
Patricia McKenzie resides at God Willing Hospice Care. It’s pricey as hell. The apiary’s profits have actually paid for a lot of what her costs constitute. Medicaid pays for the rest. There are still times when I wonder if Theo will ever help me.
He says he’s ready to get rid of her. She’s broken because she’s been dependent on prescription drugs for more than half my life, and I’m broken as a result of that.
In Theopolis McKenzie’s mind, bad parenting equals the reason gay-ass kids are gay. Aka, a problem. I’ve had the “homophobia in the Black community” chat with Theo enough times to know that he’s an old dog you can teach new tricks to, but his stubborn ass won’t learn them.
The air is so much fresher in San Francisco. I know part of it is because it’s all but sitting on water and half the city isn’t basically just a dust bowl the way LA is.
I feel a breeze climb up the back of my shirt as I enter the hospice center. The place smells clinical. Like someone dropped a giant-ass vial of insulin and didn’t clean it up. (It’s happened to Lisa enough for me to know exactly what that smells like.) The walls are throw-up-your-Pepto-on-my-raw-piece-of-salmon pink and in desperate need of a long overdue face-lift. It’s quieter than I think it should be. It’s always been that way. I feel like, when you walk into a place like this, you shouldn’t be able to hear the thoughts that are running through your head like child looters straight out of some American Horror Story plot.
The desk is almost as tall as I am. I press up close against it.
“Hi, Torrey here to see Patricia McKenzie.”
The woman at the counter finally looks up. “Sign in,” she says, pointing. “You know the way.”
And I do. I’ve been here enough times to know. A handful, maybe. Probably less. Truth is, three trips to this place would still feel like a thousand. Too many.
The trips I spent coming here, on the Greyhound and the MTA, as young as thirteen years old, expedited the time it would have taken me to grow up. Thirteen is too young to be traveling a distance like that by yourself. But for her, I did.
This is a place I’ll never forget, even after she’s long gone and these halls have forgotten me.
I catch a spare glimpse of the e-reader on the sign-in desk, spotting a few lines of the book the receptionist is reading and look away so quickly. Jesus.
Delilah Fisher, whoever you are, you’re the world’s filthiest author, and you’ve scarred me for life in about eight or nine words. Congrats.
A drug called Dextropropoxyphene is the reason we’re here today. I mean, not here on Earth here. Just, like, in this shitty care center.
It’s the reason Moms is here, too. Don’t get me wrong—her use of the drug started as an entirely innocent thing. Workplace injury resulted in the need for a mild pain medication. From there, her inability to work, her inability to, thusly, pay the bills, and then her need to move in with Theo, pushed her headlong into a love affair with depression and non-medical-grade Dexedrine.
It’s like meth. It’s basically methamphetamine prescribed by people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on school, just to one day be able to give it to you.
It’s the reason Moms got sloppy getting out of the shower one day. The reason she slipped, hit her head, and would not have suffered a TBI—unless she was already on an extreme amount of ding-ding-ding, what’da we got for ’em, Johnny? You guessed it, methamphetamines. A drug, when used for a long-enough duration of time and at an excessive-enough frequency, has the potential to swell the brain even without a clumsy shower spill.
So really, I’m sure her falling and me finding her was just a little something extra God slapped in there for me.
Lisa would kick my ass for blaspheming.
While most patients in the care center have rooms that are decorated in mementos, family photos of their dogs and ugly grandkids, Moms’s room is as sparse as it was the day she was moved in here. Would’ve been up to me to put up some pics or even just mail them to be tacked onto the room’s standard-issue corkboard, but I didn’t.
Having a bunch of family photos that don’t include her or family photos of her dead brother or family photos of, I don’t know, me—that kind of thing isn’t palatable. Not for me and not for Moms either. At least, not for the version I knew.
Inside, there’s the bed—hospital grade—and an end table. There’s a pitcher for water, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t ever been used. Not by me. Definitely not by Moms. There’s a dresser where clothes and things should go. Moms cycles in and out of the same five or six sleeping gowns and that’s about it. No need for dresser drawers or anything resembling them. In the farthest corner of the room is another chair, the upholstery on which can be described as tweed’s older, uglier third cousin. There’s an ass indent in the middle of the chair so deep it might be mistaken for a moon crater, and the honey-brown wooden arms seem to have been attacked by some very aggressive toddler’s teeth.
Still, though it’s probably ridden with germs and the ghost of butts past, it’s where I sit every time I’m here.
The farthest seat. Because as much as I like to tell myself I’m a good son for continuing to visit her, I’d really rather I not be. So, a “happy” medium is me keeping as much distance as I can between me and the elephant/comatose body in the room.
Schrödinger’s Torrey.
Nelly the Nurse, as I call her—her name really is Nelly and she is a nurse—checks in on me twice. The way I figure it, she’s got an every-thirty-minutes-check-on-Torrey schedule running. Luckily for her, I never stay more than about an hour, hour and fifteen tops.
That doesn’t change now just because I live locally. I’m out of there the second it feels like I’ve paid my dues.
By the time I get back on my bus to SFSU, the tremor in my hands is gone.
13.
Gabriel’s favorite activity is running his long-fingered hands through his hair. He has a lot of it. Even though 50 percent of the time it’s trapped in some complicated up-thing (Clarke calls it a topknot). But so, it probably stands to reason that my obsession with him has to do with how many times a day he takes it down and puts it back up with the dexterity of someone who’s had what I would call an exorbitant amount of hair all their life.
“You’ve so much hair,” I say. We’re sitting right outside one of the three campus food halls, both picking at some fusion food–type dish, like stir-fry noodles, pizza toppings, and other things that shouldn’t go together but do. Or, in Gabe’s case, french fry shawarma—a thing that should go together and, yes, actually does. Give it a try.
“You’ve so much hair,” he counters.
“No, not compared to you.”
He shrugs. He’s always been so damn nonchalant about his hair when it’s always just had this ability to drive me wild. “My hair is a lot in that it’s just long. Yours is a lot in that it’s lush and thick as hell. I’m jealous.”
“Don’t be.”
His lips come to the bottle of Jarritos in his hand in a way that should probably be rated something above PG-13. “I’d kill for this to be something other than soda.”
I grunt and shove a marinara-coated piece of broccoli into my mouth. It’s quiet until I look up and realize he’s staring at me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“No. Not nothing.” That look doesn’t say nothing. “What?”
“Torrey, do you drink?”
Okay. Hello, left field. “Uhh … on purpose?”
“I feel like the answer could just be a yes or a no?” He laughs.
Setting my plastic fork down gently, I clear my throat. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t drink. I could, I guess. I just haven’t.”
“Ever?”
“Haven’t,” I clarify. “So, have not. Ever. Yeah.”
“Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Wow.”
I push my fork around my plate a little more before I realize I’m not eating this nightmarish plate of food anymore and didn’t really enjoy any of it to begin with.
“I didn’t take you for the type,” he says.
“The type? The type of what?”
He shrugs, wipes up some of the sauce on his plate with a folded French fry. “Straight edge. You weren’t all innocent like that back when I knew you.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Don’t I?”
“Do you?”
“I hate it when you do that,” I say. Truth is, I don’t. Feels like an intimate game of thumb war, only with words and eye contact that lasts just a little bit too long.
“It’s not on purpose that I don’t drink or haven’t or any of that. Just, you know, with all the shit going on at the apiary—I gotta keep a clear head. My mind’s pretty focused on what my next steps will be. How I’ll handle all this from so far away. I need to figure out what I’m going to do before the Add/Drop deadline.”
Every day, the university sends out an automated email to the entire student pop, reminding us how close the Add/Drop date is. Eleven days. The reminder sends a wave of quiet panic rippling through my system, the spiraling thoughts and physical mirror of them, a reminder that my life is not my own.
He’s quiet, stares at me but says nothing.
I need to fill the silence. “I’m a mess. If I don’t figure something out, I’ll have to leave and go back there. I’m stressing hard, and I feel like I’m losing. There’s some guy, he approached me the other day with Kiana. Like, he straight up came to my dorm to talk to me about how he was basically gonna run me from my farm. Like, on the real, it felt like a threat. It was a threat. I’m just trying to handle business and being wasted isn’t part of that.”
Finally, Gabe nods. “You think too much.”
“I—what?”
He stands so abruptly I almost fall backward in my chair from the force of his ejection.
“Let’s go,” he says. “You need to just …” He makes this wild gesture with his hands that I think means loosen up?
He’s up and walking out the door a moment later, all but demanding I follow. So I do, thick glasses pushed all the way up the bridge of my nose, plate of horrible fusion food in hand and then, as I’m walking out the door, into the nearest garbage.
He drags us to a dive bar called High Tide located a block just before we hit a section of town called the Tenderloin, a gritty, half-hopeless, half-technicolor neighborhood known for both its speakeasies and also its tendency toward crime. SFSU spent no time telling students about this area during orientation. They painted it in what I think was supposed to be a dark light, if that makes any sense. But for me, all I heard was that it never gentrified along with the rest of the city.
There’s really not a lot that’s special about it, which if you ask me, makes it pretty special. There’s a lot of glitz and glamour in Los Angeles, and it’s here in San Francisco, too.
So, occasionally, it’s nice to see something that’s basic. Easy. Simple.
It’s still pretty early in the evening. Not a ton of people in this struggle box of a dive bar, just Gabe and I plus two other groups of three and a couple of solo drinkers who seem like they’ve seen their prime twice over.
Seated at the counter, Gabriel turns on, his smile going up a few extra watts, mouth sliding long across his face, eyelashes just ready to put you in a daze. He does that all in the space of a few seconds, and the bartender seems to notice.
“Hey, man,” Gabriel says. “Can we get four shots of tequila and two pints of whatever you have on tap?”
“Kind of tequila?” the guy says, not even bothering to card us. He doesn’t even look up from the glass he’s “cleaning.”
That rag is filthy.
“I don’t care,” Gabe says. “Whatever’s cheap.”
The bartender’s eyebrows go up as if to say, you sure?
Gabriel laughs. “Whatever’s cheapest,” he confirms. “We’re not choosy.”
The bartender does a jerky chin-chuck-nod and goes off to get our bevy of alcohol, which I hope is mostly for Gabe because holy shit.
“You’ve done this a lot,” I say.
He turns to me and pulls out his wallet and debit card, sliding it across the bar. “Yeah.”
The bartender pulls on the beer tap lever like he hates it. “Close it out?”
“Keep it open.”
And then Gabriel’s grabbing the shots in his hands. “Grab those,” he says, nodding at the two sweating glasses of beer.
I don’t know whether to be afraid of the smile that’s on his face or … turned on by it?
“Have you done this before?” he says, divvying up the shots. “Right, what am I saying? Of course you haven’t. Okay,” he says, and then lifting a finger with each word he continues, “It’s lick, tequila, lime. Got it?”
“Salt, poison, fruit, yeah, I got it.”
He licks his wrist and pours a little salt on his first and then, after I lick my own, mine. “I promise the poison won’t matter to you after the first two.”
“There’s going to be more than two?”
He chuckles.
You ever sniff a habanero pepper a little too closely?
Good, don’t. Chances are, you’ve at least experienced something similar if you can recall your first time with a shot of tequila. Although, the words shots and tequila do not lend themselves to solid memory.
So anyway, then we’re going and—he is right!—I don’t care about annnnything after that.
“Wow, you really haven’t done this whole teenage-drinking thing then, have you?”
I look up from my inspection of the probably empty shot glass. Why do they call it a shot glass? Why not just, like, tiny glass or miniature cup?
Why does the
shot cup seem empty but not actually look empty?
He takes the glass out of my hand and laughs. He does not let go of my hand even though the miniature shot is no longer in it.
“No,” I say to him. “I haven’t.” Then, “My lips are a little bit numb. I think.”
“After two shots? Wow. I love lightweight drinkers.”
“You get a lot of people drunk on their first go with alcohol?”
I like the way he licks his lips after taking a pull on his beer. “Just you,” he says.
Kind of liking that, too.
My body feels like a lo-fi beat.
“Why are my lips numb?”
“One of two reasons. A: too much, too fast.”
“That one,” I say. “Bet you it’s that one!”
He laughs. “Or, well, there is B: You are mildly allergic to alcohol.”
“Cool!” I say. But really, I’m not sure why that comes out. Being allergic to alcohol is decidedly less cool than anything else.
He shakes his head. He thinks I am hopeless. Newsflash to you and him: I am hopeless.
“Why haven’t you had alcohol? You know, before you were responsible for the apiary and all that. Hard to believe your family kept all that stuff under supreme lock and key.”
“Nah,” I say, taking a long, heavy gulp off my beer. It tastes like earwax? “I just didn’t feel like I could drink.”
“I don’t follow.”
Yeah, most people wouldn’t. “Hard to feel okay about getting drunk when you’re too busy taking care of people who depend on you to pick up their slack.”
If I wasn’t taking care of bees, I was taking care of people. Adults.
Moms. Uncle Miles. Even Theo at one point depended on me to make sure the utility checks didn’t bounce and bill collectors didn’t catch him unawares by calling at inopportune times. And then when Uncle Miles died, there was a point when all I wanted to do was forget, but the bees. The apiary. Someone had to take care of that for him, and he chose me.
And Lisa chose me, too. Chose me to lean on. To make sure she ate and smiled at least once a day and spoke out loud to someone on occasion.
And me—I didn’t have nobody to lean on. So how was I supposed to lean on any kind of substance? No room for any of that.
By Any Means Necessary Page 7
