A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (42 page)

“Son,” he said as I came into the kitchen. “We need to talk.”

“Mark,” Kris said, trying to interrupt him.

“I think you have a problem,” Dad said. “And it's my fault. You were too young for this kind of responsibility.”

I stared at him for a minute, then looked at Kris.

“What's he talking about?” I asked.

“You've been stealing my meds,” Dad said, jumping in before Kris could answer.

“I've been trying to get him to put it back,” Kris said. “Before you got home. I'm sorry.”

“It's fine,” I said. “I'll take it from here.”

“Jason,” Dad said, “I know what it's like. But you shouldn't have to suffer for my shortcomings. Give me back the meds. I'll administer them myself. You can get help. You can get treatment.”

Kris got up and went back to her apartment, giving me an apologetic look as she left the kitchen.

“I've called Dr. Barton's answering service,” Dad said.

I looked at the ceiling and sighed. Then I started putting all the junk on the table back into the jar. I put Dad's meds in my coat pocket.

“Jason,” Dad said. “This is serious.”

“I don't take aspirin,” I said, without looking at him.

“What?” he said.

“I don't take aspirin,” I growled at him. “I don't take Tylenol. I don't drink. I don't even drink coffee. I never have. Never. Not once. Can you guess why?”

“I…”

“Yeah,” I said. “So here's the deal. You can make this decision yourself from now on. I'll keep doing this for you, if you can get your shit together and let me do it. You pull something like this again, I'll tell Dr. Barton to admit you to the hospital. Do you understand?”

“Jason, I—”

“Do you fucking understand?” I hissed. “Do you fucking understand what I'll do if you pull this again?”

I wasn't looking at him. I was looking at the table. I stood there for a long time with my knees locked, leaning on the table and thinking about breaking it in half with my bare hands.

“I understand,” Dad said.

“Good,” I said.

I went to my room and put my junk jar back on the table next to the door. Then I stood in the middle of my room for a long time. I heard Dad go into his room and close the door. A muscle in my face was jumping. Finally I walked over to the corner next to my closet and picked up an ax handle I kept there. We'd brought it up from Eugene. It was a long, thin piece of hickory, the handle from an old felling ax. I looked around the room for a minute and my eyes settled on my bedroom door. I walked over and swung the ax handle maybe a dozen times, exhaling on each swing. The aged hardwood smashed the hollow-core door to pieces, cutting long horizontal gashes in the thin plywood. Then I walked over to my bed and beat on the mattress with the ax handle until I got tired. When I was gasping and sweating, I sat down on the bed and leaned on the handle to catch my breath.

This was what Han Solo would do. The door, rather than the sick old man. The doses, rather than the hospital. I could be a better man than my father. If I couldn't do anything else, I could do that.

After I'd collected myself for a few minutes, I got a roll of duct tape off the top of my dresser and used it to piece my bedroom door back together again.

*   *   *

When Dr. Barton got my dad's message he called our house, and I picked up. We talked about what had happened, and the likely outcomes if we kept doing what we were doing.

“This shouldn't be your problem,” he said.

“It shouldn't be anyone's problem. But life doesn't work like that.”

“No,” he said. “But it really shouldn't be yours. This whole thing was a bad idea.”

“What's the alternative? Put him in the hospital?”

“No. That was a bad call on my part. He can administer his own meds. I won't admit him. I'll see if we can get the same nursing service that administers the AZT to handle the narcotics. Or maybe we can give him the heavy stuff with his AZT, but leave him some Valium to help him sleep. One way or another, it shouldn't be something you have to deal with.”

“What should I do in the meantime?”

“Just check him every so often when you know he's pushing the meds. If he doesn't breathe at least once every two minutes, go ahead and call an ambulance.”

After I hung up the phone, I wondered if I'd actually call an ambulance when the time came. But it never did.

 

65

Alexis and I broke up after about a month. I broke up with her because I was tired of feeling like I was walking through a minefield. She talked me out of it, waited ten days, then broke up with me. I gathered that it was kind of a face-saving thing.

Luckily, I had a shoulder to cry on. Marti and I had started spending a lot of time together. At first she was there for emotional support, but then we got to be better friends—and then we moved on to the late-night telephone confessions of mutual attraction. We knew we were on course for a cliché, but we were willing to be predictable. We spent a few months playing the “No, we can't—it'll hurt Alexis!” game, but at the end of the school year Marti called me to tell me that Alexis had announced she was dropping out of Garfield.

“She wants to move out on her own,” Marti said. “Get an apartment.”

“I guess that's mathematically possible,” I said.

Like most of my friends, including Marti, Alexis had a part-time restaurant job. I got left out because I was still only fifteen years old. But I suspected Alexis would be in for a rude awakening if she tried to go from working ten hours a week to fund her perfume habit to working full-time and trying to pay rent and buy groceries and all that other crap.

“It might work or it might not,” Marti said. “But she's not going back to Garfield. She's a hundred percent sure about that.”

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“I don't know. It still feels wrong.”

We sat there for a while, just breathing into the phone.

“Why would she care though?” Marti said, finishing the argument for me. “If she's not going to be around school. I mean, if we're not all going to see each other every day. It shouldn't matter. She's back with Marshall anyway.”

That was news to me, but not really surprising. Marshall was one of the band geeks Alexis had dated the year before. After they went out, he became the captain of the swim team, and now he was a hot ticket in the high school dating scene. He was six-three, he had washboard abs, and he was half Jamaican so he was always this offensively healthy light brown color, even in the dead of winter. If Michelangelo had sculpted in milk chocolate, he probably would have produced something like Marshall. I kind of hated him and wanted him to die, but cattiness between straight dudes wasn't socially acceptable in the 1980s, so I tried to keep it to myself.

“I don't think it will last,” Marti said. “But I guess it means her grieving period is over.”

The next day after school, Marti and I went back to my place. Having had a lot of time to think about what I'd done wrong with Alexis, I was ready when things heated up. Or I thought I was. I at least had a plan for pretending I was ready. Either way, we ended up having sex by the end of the week.

*   *   *

The lead-in to my first sexual encounter was, unsurprisingly, kind of weird and awkward. Marti came over to my house three nights in a row, and every night we went a little farther, but on the last night I just couldn't close the deal. I blamed it on my dad being in a drug coma in the next room. Since we certainly couldn't do it at her house, Marti took me camping that weekend.

The drive out to the country was inauspicious. The trip took longer than we thought it would, so it was past dark as we were nearing our destination. The road went through a series of valleys, curving left and right, rising and falling. Which was why we didn't see the two cats that were sitting in the middle of the highway eating roadkill until it was way too late.

We both screamed. We both jammed our feet into the floor of the car so hard we nearly stood up in our seats. We both closed our eyes. The noise was like someone hitting a bag of celery with an aluminum baseball bat. When it was over I eased down into my seat and turned to comfort Marti, but she still had her eyes closed, her elbows locked, and her feet off the pedals. Which was concerning to me, since we were still going forty down a two-lane stretch of winding blacktop.

“Marti!” I shouted. “Pull over!”

“Okay,” she whispered, peeking out of one eye and easing the car over to the side of the road. She relaxed back into her seat as the car slowed.

“Are you okay?” I asked after we'd come to a complete stop.

“Yes,” she said. Her face was streaked with tears, but she seemed calm.

“Okay,” I said, reaching into my backpack and taking out a hunting knife I'd brought with me. “I'll be right back.”

“Whoa!” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Well … I have to go back and check on them.”

“So what do you need the knife for?”

“I—Marti. If those cats are still alive, they're fucked. We can't leave them like that.”

“No!” she said.

“Well, but—”

“NO! If you get out of this car with that knife, you are not getting back in.”

I sat there for a minute thinking it over. It was hard to do the math: calculating the odds that either of the two cats was still alive after getting plowed under by a Volkswagen, against the hassle of getting left in the middle of nowhere by a girl I was supposed to be losing my virginity to this weekend.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Let's go.”

She put the car in gear and we continued on our way.

When we got to the campsite we put up our tent, gathered some wood, and got a fire going. I would have thought the cat thing would put a damper on the evening, but by the time we'd roasted some hot dogs and told a few ghost stories, the accident on the highway seemed like a thousand years ago. Marti had brought her portable stereo, and we left it sitting on the hood of her car, tuned to a local radio station, while we crawled into the tent and started making out. It was a decision I'd come to regret a half hour later, when Madonna's “Crazy for You” came on at the exact worst possible moment—not that I had any idea what that moment was. In spite of years of mandatory public school sex education, significant exposure to a wide variety of printed pornography, and a real-life personal how-to at age four, I had no idea what I was doing. At one particularly awkward pause in the process Marti looked up at me, raised her eyebrows, and said—very encouragingly, like she was talking to a pathological idiot—“Why don't you try some pelvic thrusts?”

That kind of clinical language might have been a turnoff for some, but I was mostly grateful for the clear guidance. I thrust my pelvis a few times. And had—for me, never having done this sort of thing on my own—a complete revelation about what that thing was
for
. Within about thirty seconds I abandoned all dignity and just started chasing this new feeling as fast as my body would let me. And when my moment of triumph finally came, I pushed down onto Marti, gasped, and said, “Holy
shit
! Jesus!
Wow
. I—
wow
. Marti. Goddamn. I see what all the fuss is about now. Holy crap, I can't believe people even put clothes on after that.”

Marti was laughing uncontrollably by then, but in a nice way.

*   *   *

By the end of the summer, I was looking back on my decision to break up with Alexis as the last rational moment I would ever have about my interaction with girls. Things had seemed so clear that day. If something seemed like a bad idea, I just wouldn't do it. Alas, never again. Marti and I dated for two months, doubling my record with Alexis, but they were a very fraught two months. Alexis ran away from her parents' house and moved back in with Marti, which made the start of the relationship kind of tricky. Plus, contrary to her assertions that she was “fine with it,” Alexis took to walking around Marti's house in a bikini and giving me long hugs whenever we ran into each other. I was pretty clear that Alexis didn't want me back. She was more interested in proving to herself, and to Marti, that she was the hotter property of the two.

I knew all this, yet I seemed incapable of not falling for it. I thought this must be what it was like to suffer some kind of traumatic brain injury. There was Marti, who'd been nothing but loving and loyal, and I was throwing her over for her snake of a best friend, who'd talked me out of breaking up with her just so she could be the one to dump me. For some reason, I thought I had moral cover as long as I didn't actually lie or cheat, so I broke up with Marti early one morning in her car, after she drove me home from a party. She saw it coming. She was crying before I even started.

“It's not you,” I said totally unself-consciously. “It's me.”

“Yeah,” Marti said. “I know. And you know what? I deserve better. Get the hell out of my car.”

I got out and went up to my porch. She sat parked in my driveway for five or ten minutes. Then I heard her scream, “Shit! Shit shit shit fucking shit,
fuck
!” before the engine roared to life and she slammed the car into reverse, executed a quick two-point turn, and raced off up the hill. I was proud of her. And she was right. She did deserve better.

 

66

Brandon worked at a Winchell's donut shop on Broadway, directly across the street from the corner where we waited for the school bus every morning. He worked there nights mostly, and the homeless kids on Broadway knew him—and knew his shop was a weapons-free zone. I spent a lot of evenings up there, keeping him company through his shift and watching street kids come in for coffee.