I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (10 page)

Long before he'd flaked on us, I'd made up my mind to live in defiance of my father's circumscribed life, fleeing persecution at home for persecution at work like a dog clipped to a clothesline, running frantically back and forth, wearing a rut in the lawn. My last semester at Simon's Rock, a friend who lived across the hall had waded through the filth of my room and, with a “You need to read this,” thrown a book at me and walked out:
Women
by Charles Bukowski. I was in pain, and Bukowski's wounded, macho bluster made instant sense to me. Bukowski mapped the path to freedom: freedom from the horrors of working a corporate job, from kowtowing to people, from turning out like my father. Reading Bukowski, it seemed radically simple. A bellyful of bourbon was the answer. The trick was just not to run out.

I drank whiskey from a plastic bottle by myself at night in that cold basement, teaching myself Elvis and Johnny Cash songs on my father's guitar, my shoulders, back, and feet aching from work. I drank sloe gin from a flask with the leathery old Native Americans on the bus to Boulder. I drank warm Budweiser before class,
then berated my classmates for trying to bluff their way through a conversation on
Lolita
when they clearly hadn't done the reading.

Sorely hungover on the bus back from class one day, my mind flashed to the jug of whiskey I had been nursing for a couple of weeks. Poisoned as I felt on that lurching bus, the thought of that bottom-shelf whiskey actually made my mouth water. I was an explorer; I had ventured deep into the caverns of a new world. But I had been careless, and I had brought something back with me—a malign parasite. I felt the skin on my neck pucker up. I can control it, I told myself, and tried to push the ugly thought away. But I was scared.

I had awkward, drunken sex with one of the carhops from Sonic, a girl I didn't even like. I told Riley about it. It had meant nothing to me. Besides, we were broken up!

That night, she slept with Ben Bertocci. The next night, she slept with Ben White. I drank, I wept, I berated her. I told her never to talk to me ever again. I tracked her every move through my friends. She found a new boyfriend, incredibly also named Ben. Parents, please name your sons Arthur.

My mother ground her teeth in her sleep. My back gave out at work, and I was in excruciating pain for three days, unable to get out of bed. We both started losing our hair. I recalled a cautionary tale from a D.A.R.E drug-education lecture in sixth grade: If you dump a frog into a pot of boiling water, he'll thrash and kick and do anything he can to get out. But if you put the frog in cool water and incrementally raise the temperature, degree by careful degree, the frog won't move a muscle, floating idly in water that gets hotter and hotter until he's finally cooked. But what about frogs like my mother and me, frogs who have adapted to truly frightful conditions and are somehow able to continue living in the boiling water, their flesh scalding, skin peeling off their backs in sheets?

My mother never gave up. Late on Christmas Eve, she stole a Christmas tree for Tashina and me, just backed her car up to the lot and tossed it in.

“You stole that?” Tashina said, incredulous that our pillar of morality was capable of such a clear trespass.

“Well, it's not like they're going to need it now, are they?” my mom said, smiling. “Look, it's even got lights on it!”

I dropped out of CU-Boulder at the end of the semester to move back to Great Barrington. I hadn't spoken to Riley, and I didn't intend to, but I felt powerlessly drawn to her. I had forgiven Bertocci—he had written, begging my forgiveness; he had been wasted, and she had waylaid him!—but Ben White would have to be dealt with. My old roommate James had reenrolled at Simon's Rock to try to get his two-year degree, so I'd meet him in DC, and we'd travel up together. What was my plan, moving to Massachusetts in the dead of winter? Did I intend to settle the score? To win her back? I probably did it because it was the worst idea possible.

Before leaving Colorado, I worked and drank and taken trucker speed and studied for finals until I was worn to a nub. As soon as I got back East, I came down with laryngitis and bronchitis. I spent a week in bed at James's parents' house, worrying I would die, then praying I would. His mother brought me to her doctor and paid for the visit and the antibiotics—$80, a princely sum I had not budgeted for.

After I recovered, I had found an apartment close to my fellow hangers-on from Simon's Rock, a two-bedroom over a doctor's office. The doctor's neighbors had taken him to court to force him to paint the dilapidated old building and won. He had painted it eleven different bright, clashing colors. He specialized in pain management, as did I. It was perfect.

I found a roommate, a girl a year behind me, a girl I had never liked, a girl I had openly mocked. We flipped a coin for the bigger room. She won. I encountered Riley and did nothing. I encountered Ben White and did nothing.

I got a job at a pizza place two miles away (a long, cold walk in Massachusetts in January), and I worked at every opportunity. Even at $4.25 an hour, I quickly saved up the $80 I owed and sent it back to James's parents. They returned my check with a note, thanking me for paying them back but saying it wouldn't be necessary—I could consider the antibiotics a gift for my approaching eighteenth birthday.

I bought six four-liter jugs of Carlo Rossi at eight bucks a bottle and spent the rest of the money on beer. I kept the jugs at the foot of my mattress as I diligently worked my way through them. My puppies, I called them. It was comforting to hear them clink musically when I rolled over in my bed. When I awoke with night terrors, I had only to reach my feet down and touch the cool, glassy surfaces of the bottles to feel better.

An ex-classmate picked me up while I was walking to work later that winter. She chattered about the latest gossip among our friends and then turned her attention on me.

“You seem to be doing better this year,” she said encouragingly.

I lived in a room the size of a bathroom, a poster of a mushroom cloud rising over Bikini Atoll after the testing of the atomic bomb hanging over my bed. I existed on rice and beans. I washed my body, my hair, and my dishes with tiny bars of soap I stole from the restaurant where I worked. I cut my hair with a razor blade. I obsessed about Riley, and though we didn't speak, I tracked all the developments in her life—her library job, her new tortoiseshell cat's eye glasses, her life with her boyfriend, the decline of her tiny green hatchback. She had shown up at the end of my eighteenth birthday party, driven me home, fucked me, then left to go home to her boyfriend. I lost it, crying uncontrollably for a long time. When I finally pulled myself together, I heard my roommate sniffling in her room—I had cried so hard that it made her cry. If I was doing
better, I was pretty sure “better” for me was still pretty far below normal for anyone else.

“A bunch of us were worried you were going to kill yourself last year,” she said. “You were just so nihilistic. The only reason we decided you wouldn't was that you had said suicide was pointless and stupid.”

I laughed out loud, surprising both of us. But it struck me as funny: my nihilism was the only thing that had saved me from myself.

I got a better job at a deli, working sixty hours a week or more. I got hammered every night and drank all day long on my day off. One Sunday, we ran dry, and I made screwdrivers with rubbing alcohol. I was on time or early to work each morning, but the first few hours were brutal.

“You es crazy,” Ernesto, one of the Latino cooks, said to me one morning as I lugged a huge plastic container of raw chicken wings onto the countertop to be prepped before cooking.

Ernesto mimed drinking from a bottle and pointed at me. “Ery night. Ery day.”

I smiled weakly at him, my stomach doing flip-flops at the mere thought of alcohol. I lifted the lid and dumped the chicken wings onto my cutting board. They were starting to go bad, and as the smell wafted up to me, my eyes zeroed in on the clumps of feathers and hair still clinging to them. I dashed for the bathroom, vomit already boiling up my throat and into my mouth, Ernesto's laughter bouncing off the hard tile floor.

Despite my rough mornings, I was well loved in the kitchen. Dave, my boss, paid me well—I made more than my mother—and my savings piled up. I became obsessed with self-sufficiency, dead set on paying my own way. When my father stopped paying child support for Tashina, I even sent money home to my mom, determined—at eighteen—to be the man he had failed to be.

As I was finding my way, my nemesis, Ben White, had been losing his. He was abusive in class and menaced the kids in his dorm.
It was an open secret that he hit women. Still, he hadn't provided the school with the single overt transgression that would merit expulsion. When he shoved his way through a crowd of women staging a political protest on his way to the dining hall, the school didn't waste any time. He was escorted from campus that very day. He built a nest in the crawl space at his girlfriend's house in town and nourished his decline, constantly high on cough syrup he'd shoplifted, barely coherent, hardly eating, vomiting blood, increasingly erratic, increasingly violent.

We were drinking at my house one night. My roommate asked if it was cool if she invited Ben's girlfriend over. She was a genial Florida party girl who could be counted on to knock over every single drink within reach but was still impossible not to like.

“Ah . . . yeah, that's fine, just tell her not to bring Ben with her.”

A moment after my roommate made the call, the phone rang again. That would be Ben.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mishka.”

“Hi, Ben.”

“Can I come over?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we're not friends.”

“I'm coming over.”

“Don't come over.”

“I'm coming over.”

The line went dead.

When the bell rang, my friend Kevin followed me down the stairs. I saw Ben's girlfriend outside by herself: bullet dodged. I opened the door to let her in.

Ben stood up from behind a hedge and tried to skirt past me into the house. Shit. I grabbed him from behind and got him in a full nelson. What now? Ben wouldn't punch me or tackle me if I released him. He'd gouge out an eye, stab me, choke me to death.

He had gotten so thin that he slipped my hold. I shoved him away and scrambled for the open door. As Kevin kicked the door shut, Ben lunged after me. The glass pane in the door shattered.

I turned the lock and slid the bolt into place. Kevin and I braced the bottom of the door with our feet, holding ourselves clear of the broken window.

Ben slowly pushed through the broken glass till his head and shoulders were inside with us. He stared at me, his eyes flat and dead.

“I'm going to kill you,” he said.

Without breaking my gaze, he rolled his torso around inside the jagged window frame. Blood instantly darkened his T-shirt, and wet folds of it slid down his arms.

“Kevin,” I said, “go upstairs and call the police.”

The cops showed up shortly after Ben left, and they grudgingly took my report. After they had gone, my gathered friends laid into me. What the hell did I think I was doing? We hated cops. Cops weren't going to do anything. This would only anger Ben enough for him to actually kill me. I didn't disagree, but I couldn't sit back and do nothing.

Days later, Ben was gone, having fled back to Florida. Had calling the cops worked? No, he had been too easy to get rid of. I recalled a line from Circus Lupus's “I Always Thought You Were an Asshole”: “Florida is not so far away / In fact, it's just another grave.” That story Ben always told about his friend who had set a girl on fire and buried her in a swamp . . . could he have been the one who did it? I wouldn't feel safe till he was in jail or a mental institution, and I worried that I hadn't seen the last of him.