I Am Not Myself These Days (13 page)

T
he apartment is a shithole.

 

Every window is wide open and the frigid October wind is howling through, pushing everything that isn't heavy enough into swirling piles in the corners. A Celia Cruz CD, Jack's favorite, is blaring on the stereo.

“Jack?” I yell out. No answer.

I put my bags down in the foyer and walk into the living room. His backpack is lying on the floor, flayed open with bottles of lube and dildos and leather toys spilling out like guts.

“Jack? I'm home.”

No one's in our bedroom. The faucet is on in the master bath and I walk in and turn it off. There are scorch marks on the countertop and bottles of lotion and Vaseline scattered on the floor. The floors in all the rooms are covered with muddy footprints. The candle on our nightstand has burned down completely and spilled a puddle of wax onto the unmade bed.

Back in the living room there's a stack of foil deli takeout containers in the corner filled with barely eaten egg burritos. The futon is folded out flat and dragged into the middle of the room. It's covered in stains. Sheets have been dragged out of the bedroom and lie wadded up in piles next to it. Every towel we own is scattered around the floor.

On the plane on the way home, I didn't have a drink. Not one. A twelve-hour flight. It was the longest I'd gone without alcohol in as long as I can remember. I am tired of always being drunk or being sick. Of not eating. I am tired of throwing up when I do eat. And I missed Jack. Entirely. I thought of his note.
See me in everything, and hear me on your shoulder
. The entire time I was in Japan I
did
see him everywhere. “Does he watch you?” Mr. Hatsumoto asked me. “Yes. Very well,” I said back. And it was true. When Mr. Hatsumoto told me to leave the club, I did. Because Jack was watching. Mr. Hatsumoto was standing in for Jack.
Pack it in, Aqua. Time to go
. Aqua fading out, me showing through. A class-A, diamond-studded fuck-up. I can't tell when it starts to happen; someone needs to show me. Make me notice. Pull the plug when everyone else wants me to keep drowning. When everyone else wants me to show them how to have a good time. Wants to push me under and dance on my head. The geeky first chair junior high bassoon player peers out from behind the false eyelashes, pleading for someone, anyone, to pull the fucking plug. Pull the goddamn fucking plug. This is Jack's job.

Where the hell is Jack?

A message on the machine:

“Aidan, it's Dolores.” Dolores is the new dispatch operator at the escort agency in midtown who replaced Elaine. “Where are you? I have a party in a room at the Regis. They need party favors and two guys. Open ended. Call when you get this; your pager's not working.”

Where the hell is Jack?

Where the hell is Jack?

Where the hell is Jack?

I don't know what to do.

Where the hell is Jack?

I stand motionless in the foyer staring at the door. I've never felt more sober and more drunk at the same time. But I'm not drunk. I'm just confused. I haven't talked to Jack in ten days, my home is a disaster zone, and I'm confused.

I turn around in circles, trying to spot something that makes sense.

Jack's pager is on the kitchen counter. Seeing the pager not attached to Jack is like seeing someone's lung sitting on the counter with them nowhere in sight.

As I step into the kitchen, shards of glass crackle under my shoes. Broken crack pipes. I pick up the phone.

Hey, it's Ryan and Grey, we're not home, leave a message at the beep
.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

Where the hell is Jack?

I don't know what to do.

Please. Please. Come in the door. Come in the door and pull the plug.

I go to the freezer and pull out the bottle of Absolut. This is all I know how to do when I don't know what to do next. The bottle freezes to my hand as I walk back through the windy living room.

I take a long swallow from the bottle and set it on the floor. My stomach grinds in opposition.

Little by little, through the night, I pick up pieces of my home and put them back where they belong.

By the time
Blue's Clues
comes on, the apartment is back to how I left it.

Please come in the door.

Please come in the door.

I
t's just the TV,” I tell my mother on the phone. “Hang on a sec.”

I cover the mouthpiece and throw up again in the toilet. I find the idea of trying to throw up as quietly as possible kind of funny.

“Why don't you turn it down?” she asks.

“Jack's got some people over; they're watching a movie.”

Every word that comes out of my cotton-filled mouth requires Herculean effort.

“How was LA? Who did you meet?” she asked. My mother's voice has always sounded like an eight-year-old girl's on the phone.

“Drew Carey, Bob Saget, a bunch of people. I don't know,” I say.

“Anybody on my soap?”

“I told you, it's a campaign for ABC. Your soap is on CBS.”

“Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?”

I consider letting loose with the litany I've collected of things she's done wrong over the years, but hold back. I wouldn't be able to make it halfway through without vomiting, and I want to save it for a time when I'm a little more oratorically suave. Besides, they're mostly pretty petty transgressions, anyway.

“No, I'm not mad. We're just in the middle of the movie. It's at a good part,” I say.

“Well, I can tell you don't want to talk, so go back to your movie. Say hi to Jack.”

“I will.”

After I hang up I decide to lie on the bathroom tile just a little longer. I'm relatively certain I'm not expected anyplace, and right now the less I move the less I hurl. It's about the most complex equation I can deduce about my current situation.

I have no idea what's going on in the living room, except that it's loud and there's more than one person. Why must mornings always be such a puzzle?

It must be Saturday, since Mom always calls at the beginning of the weekend. I know I got back from LA on the redeye last night. We filmed celebrities making little fifteen-second antidrug speeches on a sound stage in Ventura the entire previous week. It was like school picture day. One by one they would arrive, get made up, sit in front of a backdrop, and blather on about how drugs are bad, they fuck up your schoolwork, mess up your family, blah, blah, blah. One of them even showed up sky-high. We couldn't use anything we shot of him.

Laura and I spent our nights partying at the Skybar. I brought Aqua with me just for fun, and the second-to-last night we were there we invited the client out with me in drag. She was young, and we thought she could handle a little fun.

When the news reached the agency back in New York, they freaked. Apparently, there's a fine line between being creatively interesting and potentially client-threatening. News to me. Two of the partners wanted me to come home immediately. Which I would have, had they been able to find me.

Laura, the client, and I stayed out the entire night and went straight to the shoot the next morning, me still in drag. My plan was to go to the wardrobe truck and find suitable clothes for the day, but when the director saw me he wanted me to shoot a spoof spot for the campaign. When any drag queen is faced with a camera, we become powerless to stop ourselves. Any resulting catastrophe can hardly be blamed on me.

The difficult part of improvising an antidrug spot when one is still completely smashed is coming up with one's motivation. After a few insincere attempts I came up with this:

Now it's not like they're going to air it or anything, so I'm really not sure what the resulting fuss is about. By the afternoon when we all sobered up, the client didn't think it was that funny anymore and begged us not to tell anyone back in New York. Unfortunately, Laura and I had been on our cell phones all morning telling everyone we knew.

By the time we got on the plane home that night the client had turned a little chilly toward us. Luckily, before we checked out of the hotel, Laura and I had collected our entire minibars to keep us company on the flight home.

I got home from LaGuardia at six forty-five in the morning and walked into our apartment in the middle of another party. They've been happening with increasing frequency during the past month. One client in particular wants to party two or three nights a week. Tired of getting kicked out of hotels, the group now meets at our place. Our kitchen gets turned into a crack lab, with freshly cooked rocks drying on a plate on the counter. Jack makes them smoke in there too, as a courtesy to me. I have never tried crack, and it doesn't really interest me. Even though his clients and escort friends are all well-heeled, I still have an image of crack as being the drug of choice for the South Bronx set. Anyway, I'm still perfectly content with my booze and very occasional sniff of old-school powdered coke. And maybe a little weed. Just an old-fashioned guy, I guess.

I use the handles on the cabinet under the sink to pull myself upright. Slowly standing, I give myself a quick once-over in the mirror. At least I got most of the way out of Aqua last night before passing out. I grab the phone and head out into the apartment.

Three guys are fucking on the floor near the living room windows. I watch them. They're oblivious to me standing twenty feet away. I'm jealous. Jack and I have only had sex once since I got back from Japan. They shift positions stiffly, mechanically; they've probably been fucking all night. I've learned that about crack from Jack. He says it makes people want to fuck for hours, mostly just to expend the nervous energy.

I walk into the kitchen to hang up the phone. Jack is there with an escort named Trey whom I met at my birthday party. I'm not that fond of Trey, for no particular reason. He just reminds me of that kid in high school who was always called in to the principal's office for questioning no matter what the crime. He could start a second profession as an extra in police lineups.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” Jack says. I can't tell if he's high.

“Where's the client?”

“He's gone. He left last night. How was the show?”

“I don't remember. I'll wait for the reviews,” I answer. “Can I turn down the stereo?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Back in the living room I turn off the music completely. The fucking trio doesn't even pause. This is the part of the day when I'm most uncomfortable. I'm too sick to go out and do anything, and don't really have anything I want to do anyway. I don't have a show tonight. I have nothing to get ready for. I don't really feel like watching TV. I have no hobby. Except for drinking.

I start to wonder what the people all around me do on days like today. I live in a box in the sky with boxes identical to mine on all sides, and forty stories of identical boxes below me.

What do all those boxed people do on Saturdays? Do they go to movies? Museums? Do they walk their dogs? I see people with dogs on the street all the time. Why don't we have a dog? I used to go to brunch. Are people going to brunch right now? Or does everyone wake up as trashed as me and find their spouse in their luxury kitchen with whores and crack? I want to peel up the floorboards and peer down at them. Get some ideas.

The thought of standing here all day simply waiting for the next throwing-up episode starts to crush me.

I throw on a pair of sweatpants and my down jacket and head for the door.

“Where you going?” Jack yells from the kitchen.

“Out to walk the dog,” I say.

I walk the streets the entire afternoon, trying to unravel the mystery of Saturdays. I head down Madison Avenue, staring at couples, trying to see what's in their shopping bags. I see people eating in windows, getting into cabs. It's all I can do to stop myself from running up to them and asking, “What are you doing today? Where are you going? Can I join you?”

I try Laura on her cell. Maybe she wants something to eat. I'm sure she's home, but after this crazed past week in LA she probably sees my number on her caller ID and she doesn't pick up. I stop in a diner near Twenty-fourth Street and order a tuna melt but have to leave halfway through because I can't keep any of it down.

I keep walking. Down Madison to Twenty-third. People coming out of a movie. I follow two women down Park Avenue and try to listen to their conversation. One of the women is debating with the other whether or not she should start trying to get pregnant. At Fourteenth Street I run into the farmers' market. Hundreds of people are picking their way from stall to stall, inspecting apples and squash and onions and other things that remind me of the garden I had growing up.

I pick up an acorn squash and decide to buy it. It's reassuringly solid and heavy as it swings back and forth in its plastic bag, knocking against my leg as I walk on. Maple syrup. I used to love squash baked in the oven with maple syrup. I pick up a bottle and add it to my bag. Look at me. I'm shopping. Butter. I need some butter too.

It's almost six o'clock by the time I get home. I dread going inside. I half-expect the same robotic threesome to still be fucking in our living room. But they're not. The apartment's empty. It's a wreck again. I can't keep up, and Jack and I keep forgetting to call the cleaning woman.

I'm too tired to bother with the squash, so I just take it out of the bag and set it on the counter. That's enough for me, actually. Just looking at it there on the counter amid the piles of tin foil and burnt spoons and Brillo pads and glass pipes and baking soda and rubbing alcohol and the rest of the crack paraphernalia is soothing enough.

Jack's asleep in the bed. Without taking off my clothes I crawl into bed next to him. He's hot, and sweaty, and oily. He's frowning in his sleep. Jack crashes hard after a party, and then beats himself up for missing workouts or time with me and his friends.

He wakes up fitfully as I crawl up closer to him. His skin tastes like crushed aspirin all the time now.

“Hey, you,” he says groggily.

I pick up the remote and turn on the TV.

“Hi.”

“Where you been?” he asks.

“Grocery shopping,” I say, staring at the TV.

“Admirable.”

We watch
Sanford and Son
for a while. Silently.

“Jack?”

“What.”

“I think we should slow down our partying for a week or so.”

“I know,” he says.

“I'm tired.”

“You're drinking too much,” he says. He's right. I'm now way past the point of it being a silly little vice.

Sanford and Son
ends and
Andy Griffith
comes on. Jack gives a halfhearted attempt to whistle along with the theme song.

“Are you having problems with crack?” I ask him during the first commercial break.

“Maybe a little,” he says.

“I thought you faked smoking.”

“I usually do. There was just that one big party while you were in Japan. It went on too long.”

“You suck when you're high,” I tell him.

“Sorry.”

“Let's take a week off. No rock. No calls. No booze. No Aqua,” I say.

“Have you asked her?” Jack asks.

“She'll use the time to go to Mexico and get that abortion she always wanted,” I say.

“Okay. A detox week.”

When
Andy Griffith
goes off, I flip to a nature show. Snakes of the Amazon.

“Everything's cool?” Jack asks me.

I think for a sec. No. Everything's not that cool, really. But what other option do I have but to try for a week to make it cool again?

“Yeah,” I say finally.

“Good.”

I roll on my side and close my eyes.

“We're having squash tomorrow,” I say before drifting off to sleep.