Five Boroughs 01 - Sutphin Boulevard (27 page)

When I was done dad-ing him, Shawn pulled up his hood. It dipped low, shading his eyes. “Take care, Mr. R.”

“You too, kiddo.”

Shawn backed away from my door, hand in the air. Just before he jogged down the staircase, he said, “Just so you know, Butler was talking shit about you with one of the eleventh grade teachers.”

What the hell?

I started to demand an explanation, but Shawn disappeared through the door too fast for me to react.

A
LTHOUGH
THERE
were technically twenty more minutes left in the school day, the halls were deserted. Even the payroll secretary seemed to have vacated the premises. I swore under my breath and half jogged down the corridor, jerking at my lanyard before managing to unlock the door to the lounge.

David wasn’t there, but Nunzio was. I hadn’t seen him since the day of my family’s failed intervention, and the sight of him hunched over a table with his lip caught between his teeth packed a punch.

My thoughts scattered somewhere between “fuck, I miss him” and “fuck, he’s gorgeous,” and I briefly failed to grasp the right neurons to make my brain operate. I took a step farther into the lounge, saw that it was empty, and released a breath.

“Have you seen David in the past few minutes?”

Nunzio didn’t even look up. “Nope.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

My only answer was the click-clack of keys on Nunzio’s laptop. I walked around the table and stood beside him.

“Did you talk to him at all today?”

Nunzio stopped typing. He stared at the laptop screen, shook his head, and pushed his chair back without standing. “What’s the problem, Michael?”

“Allegedly one of the kids just heard him talking about me.”

This time Nunzio’s gaze rose. He was off in a way I couldn’t easily decipher. Face pale and vacant, eyes flat and glum.

“Are you okay?” I asked, starting to touch the side of his face.

He evaded and got to his feet, ignoring the second question and gruffly responding to the first. “I’m pretty sure the only person David was talking to was me.” Nunzio gave me a visual pat down that I swore had the power to expose my thoughts as well as liquid fire contraband. “He told me you were drinking in the classroom.”

“I wasn’t drinking. He’s full of shit.”

“He said he saw you with a bottle. Same difference in my opinion.”

“How the hell is that the same thing?”

“Because even if you weren’t throwing it back while he was in the room, you were obviously planning to get the party started earlier than is typically a good idea.” Nunzio leaned in and inhaled, his lips almost brushing mine. I swallowed hard, forcing myself not to take an automatic step back, and let him smell me. I didn’t try to hide it and didn’t flinch when his eyes narrowed with condemnation. “And it looks like he and I were right.”

“You’re acting like I was smashed all day. I didn’t crack it open until thirty minutes ago.”

“So you can be drunk on the ride home? I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get? Who the hell wants to be sober on their commute?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Mikey. Maybe people who don’t need a drink to function in everyday activities like taking the subway.”

The sarcastic tug of his mouth almost prompted me to end the discussion there, but I pushed on. “Is he going to tell someone else or what? It wouldn’t hurt for you to keep me in the loop when this kid is going around and running his mouth about my business.”

“There wasn’t a need to keep you in the loop because I handled it. I wasn’t trying to get you more stressed when you’ve already obviously gone off the fucking deep end.”

Knowing they’d discussed the situation loud enough for a kid to overhear had me more stressed than them chatting about it over coffee with Price. I’d rather her send me to rehab than have my students knowing what a lush I was.

Again I thought of the look on Shawn’s face and the way his gaze had flicked down to the bottle.

“Damn.”

I saw Nunzio shake his head in my peripheral vision.

“You’re going to fuck yourself over at this rate. I guarantee it.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, and for some reason it’s still hard to care.”

“Oh, so you just decided to stop giving a shit about your job?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

It came out just flip enough to enrage him, and he grabbed the collar of my shirt. “Bullshit. You love this job way more than I do.” He pulled it taut and gave me a slight shake, forcing me to meet his glare yet again. “We have been best friends for almost as long as we’ve been alive, and this is the first time I don’t know what to say to you. You sank so fast into this shitty spiral that it seems like your ass was slicked up with WD-40 from the start. I’ve accepted the part where you have decided to shut me out while you’re walking around under this permanent dark cloud, but I can’t handle this defeated, bullshit attitude.”

I put my hands on his, intending to disentangle them from my collar, but didn’t follow through with the motion.

“The only thing I’m giving up on is my desire to be lucid most of the day. I thought being back to work would help, but it didn’t. There was still too much time to—”

To think, to wallow, to roast slowly on the spit of my own despair. I didn’t want to say any of those things. I wasn’t looking for pity or sympathy, and people assumed you wanted one or the other if you spoke out loud about your problems.

“If I’d been teaching today, it wouldn’t have been this way, and you know it.”

“I have little confidence in that claim.”

The faint pang of anger turned into a bludgeoning hammer, and I pushed Nunzio back. “I wouldn’t drink around the kids. I’m not that stupid. Shawn only has a clue about what’s going on because of you and your loud mouth.”

Nunzio looked at me sidelong. A frustrated sound escaped his lips. “Are you—Michael, seriously? You can’t even own up to the fact that you shouldn’t have brought in a bottle? That maybe it’s time to admit that you have a real problem?”

The issue wasn’t admitting I had a problem. I was very much aware of that. The real issue was whether or not I wanted to stop. The answer was almost always no. Not at all.

“You sound like my aunt.”

“Maybe because she was right.”

“Maybe.”

Nunzio watched me, waiting for a response, maybe one that was profound and heartening. Promises to chin up and change. When I said nothing more, he slumped.

“I can’t watch you do this to yourself, Michael. I can’t watch you do it to Ray.”

I shrugged, my movements wooden. “So don’t.”

Nunzio drew back as though I had hit him, and I realized the implication of my words. I opened my mouth to reword the statement, to fix things, but I was struck silent by the flush that stole over his face, and the sudden dampness of his eyes.

“I wish I didn’t love your stupid ass so much.”

My stomach dropped.

“Nunzio, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Just leave me alone,” he said, voice thick. “And next time someone comes running to me out of concern for you, I’ll tell them to piss off, and I’ll mind my own business.”

“But that’s not what I meant.” This time it was me who grabbed his arm, fingers digging in, even as he shoved me away with way more force than I’d used on him. “Can you please just calm down?”

“No, I’m not going to fucking calm down. You’re a dick, and I’m tired of running after you and begging you to give a damn. I’m tired of trying.” Nunzio grabbed his laptop and tucked it under his arm. “Just go home. Everyone else is gone, anyway.”

I wanted to follow, but an invisible force kept me in place and prevented me from taking the three strides needed to stop him from leaving, and he stormed out of the lounge.

My stupidity and failure to act was becoming the stuff of legends.

I returned to my classroom to get my things, and popped a Xanax bar to ease the constant pang of foreboding about the state of my job and the state of my relationship with the scant people who mattered. The fragile mental walls that had kept me upright for the majority of the day were crumbling. It was imperative that I get my ass home before I fell apart in public.

I fled the building, and the cut of the wind forced me into lucidness, but that was a big problem while Nunzio’s words were still on blast in my ears.

I went over the conversation multiple times on my way home, but the analysis brought no clarity. He was right, I was wrong, he was sick of me, and I deserved it. Simple investigation, case closed.

My overspiked orange juice was finished by the time the E train made it into Queens. I could smell my own breath and sweat, and in my mind, the people around me knew I was drunk. Instead of NYC indifference, I read judgment on their faces. When the combination of booze and benzos hit me, the phantoms of my paranoia grew more opaque. I churned out make-believe headlines that would be plastered across the Post if I keeled over in the middle of the subway.

High School Teacher Hit by Train After Schooltime Binge.

They would work in the gay angle somehow, and then a conservative Republican from Staten Island would notice my last name and start ranting about immigration even though Puerto Rico was a fucking territory.

Gay High School Teacher Hit by Train After Schooltime Binge—Citizenship Status in Question.

That was more like it.

The sudden need to get the hell out of the packed subway car was nauseating. I tried to breathe evenly, to stop feeling overheated and amped up, ready to pick a fight just so I could be mad at someone other than myself, but it didn’t work.

When the train jerked to a stop at Sutphin Boulevard, my head was spinning. I was fully marinated in vodka, the feeling intensified by the Xanax, and I took slow, stumbling strides to my block.

Raymond’s car was gone, and the house was dark. I crawled to my room, the walls and stairs shifting like shadows through my blurry eyes, but I was still not disoriented enough to forget about David and Nunzio and the look on Shawn’s face.

Everything collided like tumbling dominoes, and the unavoidable reality of my life falling apart bit by bit had me on a gangplank leading to some ominous abyss. Needs and wants wove together until I couldn’t tell what was imperative and what was arbitrary, especially when I knew I would never get any of it anyway. Especially not a way to escape this cycle of failure and regret that dragged me below the surface with insistent waves.

I polished off the dregs of a bottle of whisky, and when the clawing anxiety wouldn’t subside, I gobbled down another bar. A voice tickled the back of my head, reminding me that I’d already taken some, but I forgot the warning almost as soon as it crossed my mind.

The pressure in my chest and the endless machinations of my fucked-up brain built until I knew, without question, that I was losing my mind, and that my life was a cosmic joke. It set me off like a pin yanked from a grenade.

I broke into great, heaving sobs that wouldn’t cease no matter how many breaths I sucked in, no matter how many times I tried to count to ten and find a sense of calm. It didn’t come, and I took it out on my room. Punching walls, throwing things, ripping books from shelves, and kicking over furniture—destroying everything in my path until the pills kicked in and exhaustion caused my knees to buckle, and I sank to the floor.

Time stuttered to a stop, and I fell backward into the nothingness I craved.

A
T
THE
age of eighteen, I’d known with absolute certainty that I would never end up like my father. The clarity had come to me one day after seeing him with his lifelong friends—street corner cowboys with methadone twitches—and realizing that I was ashamed of him. Not because he was an alcoholic, and at the time, a methadone abuser, but because he hadn’t cared about us enough to try to be something other than his addiction.

I’d said that to my mother every time she let him back into the house. She’d told me it wasn’t as easy as I made it sound, and I’d called her weak.

Now, fifteen years later, when I awoke to beeping machines and an IV snaking into my arm, I wondered if I finally understood her point of view. On the other hand, maybe I was just looking for a convenient excuse.

I didn’t remember what had happened to land me in the hospital, but I had no doubts it was due to something I’d done to myself. The events of the previous night—assuming it had only been one day—replayed in my mind like grainy footage recorded with an unsteady camera.

Large sections of the night were missing, but I recalled at least two instances of myself downing pills when things had begun to feel too real. It had been easy to forget about half-life once my vision had regressed to scattered pixels.

Years of after-school specials and acute intoxication awareness campaigns had clearly done nothing to prevent this embarrassment. The worst part was that it had likely been Raymond to find me in some stupor. It had likely been him, once again, dialing 911.

I stared up at the half-drained bag of fluid hanging near my bed.

Each drip was a second of my life confined to a hospital room instead of being at work, and one more step toward screwing myself in a way that was so complete things would soon be out of my control.

I closed my eyes. It felt like I’d swallowed broken glass, and my entire body was sore, fatigued, as though someone had kicked me in the head several times. Everything was wrong, and I couldn’t remember why.

Hospital ambiance filled what should have been an endless silence. The hush of voices, the louder tones of a nurse, footsteps, something rolling across tile—all of it combined to make a return to unconsciousness impossible.

I was acutely aware of where I was and of the situation. Had Raymond called for me? What had he said? Where was he, anyway? Had he finally given up on me and gone home to pack his shit to get away from the steadily sinking ship that was his older brother? Also, did Nunzio know? The possibility was enough to make a sickening sensation curdle my stomach.