I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (15 page)

It's not unusual for a young man to revisit his childhood home and want to buy it back from the new owner. I had no such desire. We had hated it here, but that hadn't lessened the humiliation of being exiled. I had no desire to return in triumph, to parade through the streets. I wanted to carpet bomb the entire town. No, too quick. I would finance a meth lab or two and watch the place rot slowly from the inside out. Corpses riddled with sores, soil sown with arsenic, dead livestock poisoning the wells . . . I wanted this backwater as ravaged and ruined in the physical world as it was in my heart.

The bankers had tricked us. They had told my mother she had to miss a payment before she'd be considered for refinancing, and then they had foreclosed. Which person had made the decision to throw us out of our home? I imagined a small, detail-obsessed man, his life constricted around money, dedicated to stockpiling it as a useless barricade against loneliness. A man whose sole responsibility was to push glaciers of money around with a keystroke or a ballpoint pen. A man with no thought for whom the movement of these glaciers might isolate or starve or trap or mangle or kill. Had he used the money he made from ruining our lives to buy a hot tub? A motorcycle? Were we ejected by something as trivial as a line through a field in a spreadsheet, a checkmark in a tiny box, a zero instead of a one, a clerical error, a typo?

The paperwork must still exist, filed away in a damp basement somewhere, gnawed by mice, peppered with their droppings. Kingston was a small town. The man probably still lived in the area. I could find his address, track him down. I would illustrate for him how a life could be ruined with a ballpoint pen, a death of a thousand punctures. I would kill him the way he'd killed me, so that he felt the dying in tiny increments. Let the pain mount so he genuinely feared his death until that perfect moment when he was so overwhelmed that he finally prayed for that which he feared most just to be released from pain.

I was shaking. I forced myself to take a breath. Was this all that was available to me, my response in any situation—rage? We had been happy here, sometimes. Between icy feuds, Tatyana and I had played epic games of badminton as the sun went down, giggling and tumbling into the soft grass until it was so dark we couldn't see. We'd gone sledding down the steep hill behind the garage, all three of us in a pile on a flimsy plastic saucer, Tashina screaming from the minute we pushed off until the very moment we hit the jump at the bottom, our three bodies separating for a brief, terrifying moment before hammering down on each other and the hard snow. It hurt—it always hurt—but we did it again and again. Nothing felt better than your own blood touching you, even violently. How long had it been since I'd spoken to either of my sisters? A year? Years?

Before he ran away, Chuong and I had spent hours and hours in the Kingston House of Pizza in town. It came back to me, blissfully unchanged, the warm air smelling of rising dough and melting cheese. Chuong and I must have pumped hundreds of dollars' worth of quarters into the Tetris arcade game. The song played in my head, and I could see Chuong dancing, imitating the little Russian dancer on the screen. Sweet, funny, crazy Chuong, the older brother I'd always wished for, ten years gone. I'd made halfhearted attempts to locate him several times over the years but finally had to strangle that hope. Chuong had been lost forever. He was in prison; he had been deported; he was dead. He had come into this world with so much working against him. Not everybody makes it.

Behind the old house was a crooked apple tree. At its base, my mother had dug a hole and buried our old dog Princess. As a boy, I found dogs as magical as some girls find horses. I had a poster of all the major breeds; I could name their characteristics and identify them by sight. In Canada, I had whined and pled with my mother for a dog till finally she agreed to take me to the animal shelter—not to get a dog, just to play with the dogs there. As soon as we
pulled up, I began wheedling anew for one of the puppies barking at our car through the chain-link fence.

“We already have the cats. Your dad said we can't get a dog,” she said. “But if we do, we're getting that one.” She pointed at a narrow dog the size and color of a small deer with huge, emotive amber eyes: Princess. My father was not amused when we brought her home that day.

God, we had adored her. I thought about Princess's body—her tufted fur that made her hind legs look like the legs of a faun, the line of longer, thicker hair that ran down her spine, the fine, soft fur on her head that we delighted in standing up in a Mohawk, whiskers like an overgrown mouse's, her sleek, glossy, dainty ears, her crooked stub of tail, most of it hacked off with an axe or a knife by her previous owner, her thoughtful, pained amber eyes . . . Now just a pile of years-old bones rotting in someone else's backyard. Her head had been so refined, her forehead sloping gently into her long graceful nose, like the head of some small aquatic horse.

It was too unfair that a stranger had custody of her remains. But what would I do if I had access to the property and no one else was around, dig her up? I followed that morbid, impossible thought. They could line her skull up against those of twenty other dogs, and I would be able to pick her out, even now, because she was one of a kind, and I had loved her that hard. She was so close. It was all so close. And still irretrievably lost.

I had wanted nothing more than to leave this place forever, but somehow being exiled had trapped part of me here forever. I stumbled through the wet, useless dirt back to the car, its headlights just a bright smear through my tears.

In the fall, I started at Columbia. My teachers were brilliant, not just insightful but so full of books that they spoke almost exclusively in quotes. My classmates were roundly disappointing. I had hoped to stumble upon another Simon's Rock, a school of brilliant lunatics
with oversized lives. The Columbia kids were uniformly white, wealthy, and restrained, their dreams as safe as milk—landing a professorship or maybe moving to Connecticut to grow tomatoes, raise children, and write. I had loved writers invested in life, Harry Crews and Flannery O'Connor and Jack Henry Abbott, not language theorists like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. They had read more than I had, and maybe they were smarter, but God, they were as dull as dirt.

Shannon left me in a rage. She was angry enough when she moved out that she paid a couple of my classmates to move the furniture she was abandoning out to the street so I couldn't use it. A wino helped me move it back in. When I offered him a handful of change, he said, “Nah, that's all right, big man. You looked like you could use the help.”

I went to class. I went to practice. I wrote. I blacked out after shows, waking up on the couch at James and Zack's apartment, waking up in the practice space, waking up on my floor just inches from my mattress. I did sound engineering for NPR at the Radio Foundation, producing sessions with Ed Bradley, Kofi Annan, Stephen Sondheim, Anthony Bourdain, and Judy Blume. I got mistaken for homeless while barely conscious on the sidewalk outside Motor City bar. I did catering gigs; I worked security; I did marketing focus groups; I got paid to take a series of MRIs. I attended every department mixer and collegiate function in order to get blitzed on shitty wine and fill my pockets with hardening cheese cubes and softening grapes.

I interned reading the slush pile at the
New Yorker
. I got hustled for gay porn. I built myself a tent in the living room and rented out the bedroom to bring my rent down to $200 a month and still had to borrow $1,000 from James's parents in order to stay solvent (a loan they were too kind to let me repay). I chewed ice cubes to curb my hunger, and I recall wondering if I could eat my own hair. At semester's end, I retrieved dry goods that departing undergrads had thrown in the trash.

With great shame, I accepted money from my mother, who had gotten a job working at one of the resorts on St. John. She was happy to give it, she said. Great things were just around the corner for me, she knew it.

Mom was right. Almost weekly, I got tantalizing encouragement. An editor at
Harper's
magazine said my short story was promising despite its flaws. An editor at the
New Yorker
said another story contained “masterful lines,” but it went without saying that they wouldn't publish it. And Mom was wrong. My drinking brought on bizarre afflictions; heat rash, a mouth full of boils, lips so swollen I couldn't leave the house, aching and blotchy hands and feet. I smashed a whiskey bottle with my right hand, and when I woke up, my apartment looked like a scene out of a slasher movie. It cost my school insurance $5,000 to get my hand stitched back together by a plastic surgeon. Everywhere I went—trying hard not to ralph in the Condé Nast building, reading Virginia Woolf on the way to band practice, locking myself in the bathroom with the DTs before my literature seminar with Pulitzer Prize–winning MacArthur Fellow Richard Howard—I felt crushed between my good self and my bad self, as they collided and strained against each other.

At my summer job licking envelopes for mailers for a DVD production house, I developed a crush on the receptionist, Allison. I talked to her whenever I could screw up the courage. We had nothing in common. She had perfect posture, perfect carriage, perfect hair. As she walked to the photocopier with unassuming grace, she smelled of shampoo and hope. I slumped, I slouched, I shuffled, I stank. She had gotten her master's in opera and was a gifted pianist, singer, and songwriter. I could barely play guitar, and my voice was an amusical groan, a bull walrus in mourning. Her father was an English professor; her mother was a mom; her
parents still lived together in the house where she had grown up; her best friend was the girl next door. I didn't just want Allison, I wanted her entire life.

The vibe during band practice that summer oscillated between resignation and desperation as we failed to make any headway. I had begun to chafe under James's leadership. As my ideas for the band were rejected with increasing frequency, I invested more in the songs I was writing on my own. I four-tracked an EP of boozy rants in my room,
Thanks for Letting Me Crash
, and used student loan money to press a thousand CDs. I was still grimly obsessed with Riley, and I fantasized about taking a bus to DC and leaving CDs everywhere in hopes that one would find her and she would hear the songs I'd written for her. Would she take me back? Would she reach out to me so I could spurn her? I didn't know. The fantasy ended with her hearing the songs and knowing how deeply she had hurt me.

I booked a CD release party at a tiny bar in Brooklyn in January and ran copies of the CD to the
Village Voice
and
New York Press
with no hope of them writing about or even listening to it. The show was a mess. The band I'd put together was drunk and ill rehearsed, and we were plagued with sound problems, but I sang every song to Allison, standing quietly in the back. After we had broken our gear down, she came and found me.

“I have to go, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your show.”

“You're leaving? You can't leave.”

People were packed in tightly at the tables around us, and they immediately started rooting for me.

“Stay! He wants you to stay!”

“I want to stay, but I have to go all the way back up to the Upper West Side, and I have to get up early tomorrow to go to Rochester.”

“He likes you! You know he likes you!”

“Just stay for one more drink. C'mon, I'll buy you a drink.”

“A free drink! That's true love!”

“I can't, I've already stayed too late. I'm sorry.”

Fuck it, then. I grabbed her and dipped her back and kissed her hard. The bar roared.

After Allison left, a reporter showed up from the
New York Press
. She had heard my CD, really wanted to write about it, and was heartbroken that she had missed the show. I went home with her, but I was too drunk to get it up. In the morning, I couldn't come. The reporter apologized as she was showing me out—she couldn't write about the CD now as it would compromise her journalistic integrity—but she wanted me to know that she really had loved it. Yes, I had potential—potential to ruin anything.