I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (24 page)

When it was clear the glass wasn't going to break, Oksana planted herself in front of my car so we couldn't leave. I turned my wheel to the right, and she moved to my right, her hands on the hood. I cranked the wheel to the left, and she moved to my left. Shit. Drunk and in high heels, Oksana was still pretty quick.

I slid my hands on the wheel like I was turning right and again, she moved to the right. But the wheels were still pointed to the left, so I pinned the accelerator and peeled out.

Oksana squawked and flung her hot coffee at my windshield as we were escaping. I blew through a stop sign, then turned the windshield wipers on, which just smeared the coffee across the whole windshield.

“This happen to you often?” Laura asked with a wry smile.

When I dropped Laura off at the Bedford L, I had another text from Oksana: “Just so you know, I fucked Chen last night. U r the biggest asshole I have ever known.”

Chen and I had been through all kinds of shit together. He'd played drums for me on my first tour six years earlier. He'd lived with me when his marriage was falling apart. He'd driven ten hours through the middle of the night to pick me up when my van died in Athens, Ohio, on tour.

We were thick as thieves. The winter before, I'd worked some ridiculous security gig for a Hennessy party one night and nicked a $300 bottle of cognac on my way out. Chen and I had worked our way through the bottle together, him on the floor and me in my bed, sipping it out of coffee cups and giggling in the dark.

Jacob had told me, before he died, that he was honest about different things with different people in his life—his mother, his girlfriend, his drug counselor. But there was no one person with
whom he was totally honest about everything. If he had just one person with whom he was totally honest, he was sure he could kick heroin. Chen was that person for me. We told each other the stuff we couldn't tell anyone else, not just our triumphant nights or petty struggles but the real shit, the fear, the weakness, the mounting darkness.

Chen had plenty of girls. Ladies loved him. That he would take my loan and then go sleep with a girl with whom I was embroiled in such an acrimonious separation, three days after she'd had an abortion—impossible.

As I was walking into my building, my eighty-year-old landlady peeked her head out of her apartment.

“Um, hi, honey, I'm sorry to bother you . . .”

“Oh, no bother, Doris, what's up?”

She tottered out into the hallway, clinging to the door frame for support. She had been quick and spry when I moved in but lately had been going downhill quickly. I did everything I could not to bother her, even slipping my rent under her door so she wouldn't have to climb the stairs to my apartment.

“Well, your girlfriend rang my bell this morning. She said she had to get into your apartment. I don't have a key so I couldn't let her in.”

Good God.

“Uh . . . wow. Um . . . you did the right thing, Doris. I don't have a girlfriend. No one should be going into my apartment other than me and Esteban.”

“Okay, hon, that's what I thought.”

“Thank you so much, Doris. I'm so sorry that she bothered you.”

“Oh, it's okay, sweetheart. Have a good day now.”

This was spiraling out of control. What was Oksana doing in Greenpoint before noon anyway? She lived in Manhattan. I called Chen at work.

“Hey, man. Uh . . . you didn't sleep with Oksana, did you?”

“What? No, of course not. Dude, I would
never
do something like that to you.”

“I mean, I don't have any claim over her so I couldn't really be mad about it. I would just want to know.”

“Dude,
no
. She's yours. I'm with Kara anyway. Why would you even ask a question like that?”

“She texted me this morning saying you guys had got it on.”

“Ugh. Man, she's just trying to find other ways to get under your skin. Don't let that bitch get to you.”

“Okay, man. I . . . I'm glad I called you about it.”

But something about it stuck in my head.

Sunday, I got drunk at Pianos, trying to put it all together. When I was drunk enough, I called Chen and asked him to come pick me up. As we were driving over the Williamsburg Bridge back into Brooklyn, I told him that I knew he'd lied to me, that I knew he'd been with Oksana, and he just needed to tell me.

He told me to fuck off, that this was total bullshit. What kind of an asshole friend was I to accuse him of something like that? I jumped out at the McGuinness exit ramp while the van was still moving and ran off.

One of them was lying to me. Oksana had reason to. She had a history of not just mildly plausible lies like this one but ridiculous confabulations. Why did I believe her and not Chen?

I went to Daddy's, another bar. I drank more, then went outside. It was raining, a warm, light, cloying rain, like hangover sweat. It couldn't be true.

I called Oksana and cussed her out for sowing doubt about my friendship with Chen. She screamed at me for a while. Then she broke down and started crying.

“What the fuck,” she said between sobs, “I couldn't believe it either.”

I hung up. Was this her greatest performance? Or was she for once telling the truth?

Then I got the craziest idea.

I sent Oksana a carefully worded text: “Just so you know, Chen has herpes. You may want to get checked out.”

Seconds later, my phone rang. It was Chen.

“What the fuck, dude, why are you going around spreading lies about me?”

He was livid.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You told Oksana I had
herpes
. I don't have fucking herpes!”

“Chen,” I said, “you are fucking
busted
. I texted Oksana thirty seconds ago. The only way you would know is if she had called you in a panic after she got the text. She would only be panicked if you guys had fucked. You are totally busted, you fucking asshole.”

Chen started talking, but I hung up; then I turned off my phone. I couldn't breathe, like I had been kicked in the throat.

Oksana had wanted to see me on her birthday, and I'd refused. Chen had gone to see her, Chen had gone home with her, and Chen had fucked her
three days
after she'd had an abortion.

I paced in front of Daddy's. I was floating in a cesspool with two humans devoid of humanity, reduced to just their appetites, one for sex and one for love. It was vile, and it was chilling. Of the three of us, who was the most debased?

Tragic as Chen and Oksana were, I was worse. I would eat anything, drink anything, snort anything, do anything just to escape. If Chen wanted sex and Oksana wanted her twisted version of love, well, at least they wanted something. What I wanted was the absence of everything: nada, nihil, zero.

Now there were real casualties. Oksana and I had created and destroyed a life. And what about Oksana? She was someone's daughter. She was crazy, but it was crazy born out of pain, pain I'd only added to. Because I couldn't stand to be alone.
Because I wanted to get laid
.

I thought of my sisters, Tatyana and Tashina, and how many times I'd seen them cry because a man like me had hurt them. I thought about them waiting outside an abortion clinic in a snowstorm, wondering if the drunk they'd been sleeping with was actually going to show up to give them a ride. Christ, Oksana was younger than Tashina, younger than my baby sister.

I thought of Oksana going under the knife and then, only days later, laying under Chen just to get revenge on me, a worthless man who had only magnified her feelings of worthlessness. This certainly hadn't been a walk in the park for me. I'd been shedding friends at an alarming rate these last few years, and now I'd lost my confidant, my confessor, my last unconditional ally. But Oksana seemed to have lost her self entirely.

I stepped back into the bar. I pounded the drink that I had left sitting by the door. I grabbed my coat off my barstool. On my way out, I pounded the drinks of the people smoking outside, then stumbled out into the rain.

My mother, my poor, beleaguered mother. She had sacrificed so much to make sure I got what I needed from the very day I was born: milk and colorful toys and stuffed animals and then Legos and mac 'n' cheese and shin guards and a baseball glove right up to losing the fucking house, just so I could go to school to turn out to be . . . what? A doorman. A drunk. A liar, a weasel, a waste. I began to cry.

At fifteen, in those horrible twenty-four hours of the shooting and the news of my parents' divorce, I had decided in a self-pitying fury that I was brilliant and doomed. At thirty-two, it was more painful to discover that I was neither brilliant nor doomed, just an entitled, self-hating crybaby.

I was no tortured artist. How little I had created between my benders and my hangovers . . . I'd intended to die in some gutter motel, a bottle in one hand and a guitar in the other, long before I made thirty. I hadn't even followed through on that. I had lived
into my fourth decade only out of inertia, bored and captive to my own limitations like the normals I hated, except dead broke.

And the
potential
I'd been hounded about since I was a kid? The only potential I had fulfilled was my tremendous capacity for failing. It wasn't just that I had been hustling in NYC for ten years without making it as a musician or a writer. I had never even made it as a bartender.

What was that first, worst hurt, that trauma of key importance that would explain all the shitty behavior that had followed? The hopelessness of my adolescence—the shooting, the divorce, losing the house—it had warped me, like one of those sad sea turtles whose shell has deformed to accommodate the six-pack holder that has ensnared it. But I had been a prick long before that.

I couldn't remember a time when I hadn't been an asshole, all the way back to when I was probably five years old. At the kids' table one night when my parents had friends over for dinner, I punched Tatyana in the face so hard that I knocked her tooth out. I mixed soy sauce and seltzer water, told Tashina it was Coke, and then ridiculed her when she trusted me, drank it, and gagged. I stole, I lied, I pooped in the bathtub. I ducked down in the back-seat of our car whenever we drove by the police station, convinced they were going to throw me in jail.

From the first moment I had known myself, I had understood that I was worthless. My mother had tried desperately to sway me over to the other side, but she'd never succeeded, not for any lasting time. Weakness was more repellent to me than anything else . . . and when it came to weakness, Jesus, I hit it out of the fucking park. Not a lick of self-control, a crawling slave to my appetites, tugging at my prick the minute I was left alone like a chimpanzee, a prisoner of my fears and anxieties and doubts, so fucking soft, all resolution crumpling at the slightest momentary desire. How could I fault Chen or Oksana for their weakness? Weakness coursed through me like I was an antenna; I drew weakness out of the air around me.

A small, exquisitely painful truth came to me. Nothing bad had ever happened to me. I had nothing to blame my bad behavior on. I'd had a few bad breaks, but who hadn't? Yet I had reacted by burrowing so deep into my own pain that it became all I could see. Had I ever once been happy in my life? I fanned through my memories like a stack of index cards. Yes. Once.

One evening before we had left Canada, my dad had taken me for a walk after dinner. I must have been very young, maybe four. He was wearing brown polyester slacks and a yellow, short-sleeve, button-down shirt with black shoes. I was wearing brown corduroys and a yellow, short-sleeve, button-down shirt with bare feet. I was just like him, except little. My dad was the coolest guy in the world. I realized that, because I was a little like him, I was a little bit cool as well.

The memory made me emit a stifled half-sob. A woman walking past me took a hopping step away, and her boyfriend gave me a look. Nothing to see here, folks, just another damaged Brooklyn man-child with bad tattoos and a drinking problem and daddy issues. More plentiful than pigeons, much less exciting.