I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (11 page)

One day that summer, my boss called me into his office.

“Sit down, Mishka,” he said.

That was a bad sign. I sat down. He closed the office door behind me. That was another bad sign.

“Listen, Mishka, I don't want to tell you how to live your life but . . . it's impossible to work with you and not notice a few things.”

Thank God. Dave was just going to ride me about drinking.

“You are speaking of my good looks? Or is it my joie de vivre?”

“The drinking, Mishka. How much do you drink?”

“Jesus, Dave, you scared me. I thought you were going to fire me.”

“No, no, you're doing great, my number one guy, I just—”

“I know, Dave, I know, I'm going to kill myself, and I have soooo much to offer and so much potential and blah blah blah, right?”

“No,” he said. “I'm not worried that you're going to die. You can drink hard for a long time without dying. But there are things worse than death. I'm more worried that you'll end up behind a desk, like me. Mishka, if I could turn my desk over and fuck it—just for spite—I would.”

I laughed it off in the moment, but slowly Dave's dread wormed its way into me. My two-bedroom apartment had become a flop for ex–Simon's Rockers, sleeping seven or eight people at a time, with one in the kitchen and two in the closet. The charm of working to drink/drinking to sleep/sleeping to work had worn off. I could labor eighty hours a week in a hot, wet, filthy kitchen for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for it but varicose veins and fallen arches. How was this lonely drudgery revenge? What would it say on my tombstone, “He Made Great Potato Salad”?

I called my mother, and she helped me reenroll at the University of Colorado. School was the only thing I did well, and I knew college was essential if I hoped to rescue my mother from working poverty. A degree would get me a job, a job would get me money, money would get me revenge. I would slave through the spring and summer, then cross the country once more not to take a stab at college but to annihilate it.

My mom found a house in Boulder, closer to CU, with a finished basement I could live in. The catch was that I had to find a
roommate. Fuck, Mom, how would I find a Colorado roommate in Massachusetts?

I asked James, I asked Bertocci, I asked all my buddies. No takers. It came to me at work one day: Scott, a cook in his forties I worked with. He loved Ray Charles, as I did; he had played drums for Lou Reed, and he liked to drink. He would be the perfect roommate.

“Man, I would love to. But I got my kid here. And, you know, this job that I love so much.”

“Hey man, no problem,” I said, feigning hurt. “It's cool. I didn't even really want you to live with me, anyway. I'm just asking every person I bump into. Hey, Speck, you want to move to Colorado with me to be my roommate?”

Speck was a dishwasher a couple of years older than me, cute with a black bob and penetrating blue eyes. She had been head of the Judicial Committee at Simon's Rock. She had compelled me to write a letter to Pay-Rite apologizing for the shoplifting thing, and she had presided over the session in which I'd had to grovel to graduate. She went by Speck instead of her real name, which struck me as self-indulgent. Why she was working as a dishwasher now, I couldn't figure out, but I knew that I didn't like her, that I would never like her.

“Sure,” she said.

I had been saving up for a car, but I knew nothing of cars. I only knew that I didn't want to get ripped off. My father knew everything about cars. He knew everything about everything. He could gaze upon anything—a bicycle, a vacuum cleaner, a particle accelerator—and see an exploded drawing: all the parts and pieces, their names and functions, how they all fit together. In my world, a car had four tires, four doors, and a hood, under which was a Bunch of Stuff. But my dad understood all the mysteries of its inner workings: when the carburetor spins, it creates a magnetic field, which
separates the gas-o-trons, which are funneled into the catalytic converter by the spark plugs with a cyclic motion that sets the engine block spinning and—voilà—horsepowers!

Bertocci's dad helped me find a car, a rust-orange 1986 Ford Bronco II. Paying for the car, the registration, the title, and the insurance took up almost all the money I had saved. But I had a car! One of the other cooks congratulated me. She had owned the same model and loved it. It had burst into flames in her driveway one day. Dave asked me if I had seen that news story about how Ford Broncos were prone to rolling at even very low speeds. The baker just laughed in my face.

On a rare day off two weeks before Speck and I were to leave for Colorado, I walked over to my friend's house on Castle Street to see if he wanted to go swimming. The door was open, so I walked in. I was halfway to the stairs before I realized someone was sleeping on the couch. I quieted my stride so as not to wake him or her, then glanced down as I passed, curious. It was Ben White.

I slipped up the stairs to my friend's room, but he wasn't there. My heart flopped in my chest like a fish on the dock. The police station was only blocks away. Should I climb out a window? No, I'd just sneak silently past that jumble of gaunt limbs on the couch and trot down the hill to the cop shop. They'd bag him, and he would be none the wiser.

As kids, we had practiced moving silently in order to spy on our parents fighting. It never worked. A stair would creak, a knee would pop. I drew a deep breath and crept past Ben White in absolute silence. I marveled once I reached the door. I had done it. Then I glanced over my shoulder and looked right into his open eyes.

Ben White was out of jail before the end of the day. Zack and another of my friends paid his bail. Apparently, Ben had just shown up in the middle of the night with a couple of fifteen-year-old runaways in an old gray sedan. Another news item filtered back to me later that night: the old gray sedan had a couple of guns in the trunk.

At work, I began setting up my cutting board next to the fire exit in order to make a quick escape if Ben White came in blazing. I slept in a different location each night so he wouldn't know where I was—a night at my art teacher's house, a night in Bertocci's barn, a night on a friend's couch. A minor hood I knew offered to get me a 9mm. No, I would rather die than kill.

Two nights before I was to leave, I got shitfaced at Speck's going-away party, perhaps because I knew there would be no party for me. She was catching a bus the next morning for Philly in order to pack her stuff for Colorado.

I flopped down on a couch and burrowed in for the night. I was exhausted and could not wait to flee Massachusetts. It would be a great relief to hunker down at my mother's house away from all this drama. I'd work less, no more twelve-hour shifts, and focus exclusively on school. “Mishka, you can't sleep here,” Speck said, smiling down at me.

“I'm already halfway there.”

“Just come sleep at my apartment. You can sleep in a bed.”

“The magic of alcohol is that it makes the entire world soft and squishy. I'm fine.”

Speck pried me up and walked me, stumbling, back to her apartment. She laid me down in her bed and left the room. I wiggled out of my pants and T-shirt. She had been right. The bed was nice. Soft, clean sheets.

I was just dozing off when she crawled into bed with me and climbed on top.

CHAPTER 4

The Potato Peelings in the Sink Did Not Turn into Vodka as I Had Hoped

H
ad I grown? My mom seemed smaller in the narrow, cracked driveway of her Boulder rental, her shoulders a little rounder, the skin on her face softer. She cooed over me, rubbing my stubbly chin and gently mocking my facial hair: “Ooh, I almost didn't recognize you with the mustache! So handsome, like a young Freddie Mercury.” She helped Speck and me unload our bags and boxes into the basement, beds already made up for us, dinner waiting on the stove.

After sleeping for a couple of days, Speck and I crawled out of the basement and got jobs at the closest restaurant, the International House of Pancakes. Speck would hostess and was assigned a scratchy blue dress. I was handed a ridiculous floppy chef's hat and a matching navy neck scarf. My clothes now stank not of pickles, as they had when I had been working at Sonic Burger, but of pancakes and bacon.

My mom referred to Speck as my girlfriend once, and I corrected her: Speck was my roommate. We were not involved. We would never get involved. I had warned Speck not to fall in love with me, and she had laughed it off. It would be impossible, she had said; she was even harder than I was. True, we slept in the same bed. True, we hung out all the time, shared all the details of our lives with each other. True, we fucked constantly, in all manner of acrobatic positions. Speck was infertile, so we fucked joyfully, gleefully, like we were getting away with something. I had her hold her arm tight to her side one night, and I fucked her armpit because we had exhausted every other perversion we could think of. It worked, and when I came on her back, we collapsed into giggles. Best roommate ever!

While I had been spasming back and forth across the country, Mom had patiently worked her way up at her customer service job, from phone rep in the trenches to a marginally less degrading supervisory role. Since her collapse in the driveway in New Hampshire, she had never faltered again. She took everything in stride, applying her lipstick in the hallway mirror, then putt-putting off to work in her tired little Nissan Sentra. She had taught me how to drive in that little car, snugly buckled into the passenger seat, her hands folded neatly in her lap: “I know how to do it, but I don't really know how to explain it to you . . . You're smart so I'm just going to sit here and love you, and I know you'll figure it out.”

You could plan a day at the beach, wake up to a monsoon, and she'd throw open the curtains and say, “Well, look at that! A perfect day to clean the house! Why don't I put some cookies in the oven, and we can listen to that Beach Boys record, and then there will be fresh cookies when we're done cleaning?” It was maddening—
nothing
got to her. But I was so happy to see her and so relieved to be home—in a rented house I'd never been to that belonged to people I'd never met—that even her high spirits couldn't bring me down.

She'd found a boyfriend, Paul, an ex-plumber from New York who looked like a Neanderthal but was as intelligent as he was insecure, generous and coarse and easily pissed off. But he treated me like an equal, turned me on to Dave Van Ronk and Lightnin' Hopkins, and was good to my mom. I knew it was good for her to have someone.

Still, her attitude baffled me. My father treated us kids like an unpleasant, expensive chore, like buying new tires for an old car or getting a tooth drilled. But my mom had gotten royally fucked; she had built her life around a lie, devoted more than twenty years to a man who'd bailed on her for the most banal trope—a younger secretary and a red sports car. I was poisoned with resentment, not for myself or my sisters but for her, and somehow she could joke about it. It was grossly unfair for this woman, who had always put everyone else first and herself last, to be treated poorly. It made me so angry to hear how rude people were to her at work that I couldn't even be there for her to kvetch about it. I would have taken it all on for her if I could. What I really wanted was to punish those fuckers, but I was powerless.

I loathed my job. My blue-blooded New England buddies at Simon's Rock had ruthlessly romanticized the working class, pontificated at length about the merits of honest, hand-and-back work. My coworkers—weed dealers and racists and convicted sex offenders on work release—these were the salt of the earth? Working full-time, I still couldn't afford to insure the Bronco I'd blown all my hard-earned wages on. It sat silently in the garage like the fossil of some great beast made obsolete by evolution.

I loathed the other college kids. Alone in my basement at night, I imagined their fantastic lives: their Range Rovers and Land Cruisers, their ski weekends at Vail, the coeds in the hot tub, brand-name vodka, cocaine, orgies—tanned, svelte bodies writhing and grinding on each other, pure Sodom-and-Gomorrah luxurious carnality. Their privilege, their excess, their entitlement disgusted me. And I would have done anything for a taste of it.

I was exhausted all the time, dozing off on the bus, at dinner, on the toilet. But, aching and sleep-deprived, I did every reading for every class, every lick of homework. Great Barrington had taught me that fun was pointless, the low road to a life of servitude. A degree was the only way out. I stopped drinking after a humiliating meltdown on the night of Speck's birthday party and ground tirelessly toward my bachelor's.

The English department head raised an eyebrow when I turned in my application for the honors program.

“Your reputation precedes you. People are talking.”

“People talk. What are they saying?”

“That you're a good writer with a grating personality.”

“I agree with the second part.”

A letter arrived a week later: “Welcome to the University of Colorado at Boulder English Honors Program.” I mailed my dad a couple of the stories I had written but didn't hear back. I printed them up and mailed them again. Still nothing.

One night after sex, Speck rolled off me, then took my head in both her hands, pulled me close, and spoke into my ear.

“Mishka?”

“You're pregnant?” This was my running joke, more hilarious each time I said it.

I could hear Speck smile.

“No. I love you.”

I drew a deep breath. That I had feared this was coming didn't mean I was prepared to deal with it.

“When I said I wasn't going to fall in love with you, I wasn't lying,” she said. “I was already in love with you, and had been for a long time. I took that job washing dishes just to be close to you.”

“Speck,” I said, “I love dogs. I love my mother. And I love rock 'n' roll.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear us breathing in time there in the darkness. She would leave. She had to now. It would be the best for both of us.

A month later, I bought some 'shrooms from a waiter who dealt out of IHOP. Walking home with the plastic sandwich baggie in my pocket, I realized I didn't want Speck to eat them with me. Falling in love with me, then scheming, lying to me, and trying to fuck me into loving her . . . it made me angry. It was like she had gotten herself addicted to crack: I worried for her welfare, and I knew I could no longer trust her. And I was mad at her because—crack cocaine!—what the hell had she been thinking?

Tashina would trip with me. Only days after news of the divorce broke, I'd understood how it would work. Tatyana would be the good daughter. I'd be the bad son. Tashina would slip through the cracks. I'd done a couple of cool things with her since I'd been back, like bring her to see the radical feminist riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, but mushrooms would let us reconnect on a deeper level. She was fourteen. That was old enough.

We choked them down, chasing each disgusting mouthful with tons of water, then bundled up and snuck out into the winter night. We were walking up Table Mesa Drive toward the National Center for Atmospheric Research, when the mushrooms hit us so hard we could barely walk. We shuffled off the road to avoid the terrifying headlights of the occasional passing car. The snow was deep, and we made slow progress up the hill, giggling and falling.

I struggled upright at one point. The bright moon shining down made the boulders on the hillside cast dark shadows against the white snow.

“Tashina, look at the black spots on the snow! It looks like a cow.”

“You mean, like . . . moo?”

We toppled back into the snow, cackling. I loved Tashina. She loved me. We would never stop loving each other. She was the best sister for not being Tatyana. I was the best brother for feeding her mushrooms and edifying her on the grand, sweeping issues in life,
like midnight mountain climbing and David Bowie and the uselessness of America's police force.

We were half-frozen by the time we got back, post-euphoric but still cognitively disabled. I tried singing the alphabet song to myself, but I couldn't remember what order the numbers went in. Down in the basement, Speck was sitting in a chair, reading. She closed the book when I stumbled in.

“Can we talk?” she said.

“You're pregnant?” I said, grinning.

“Yes,” she said.

Turned out Speck had never actually been diagnosed as infertile by a doctor; she had just never gotten pregnant before. I picked up a twelve-hour shift at the International House of Pancakes, from five p.m. Friday night to five a.m. Saturday morning, to pay for the abortion. The graveyard shift was quiet, so I was charged with deep-cleaning all the grills and cooking fifty pounds of bacon for the morning rush. Standing over that hot grill, sweat cutting rivers down my greasy face, the tendons in my back popping and straining, I felt like I was coming apart.

My whole life, I had yearned for an older brother. Maybe that's why I had worshipped Chuong so. Where the hell was he now? In Albuquerque? In jail? Back in Vietnam? Dead? When my mother told me in high school that she'd had an abortion before she and Dad had gotten married, it made perfect sense. That had been the older brother I was missing. What would he have looked like? He would have had some good advice, which would come in very handy right now. Or at least some money.

Speck went back to Philadelphia. I started drinking again. I decided I loved her and pleaded with her to come back. Finally, she
relented and came back in the spring. I met her at the airport with a dozen roses. It was okay, for a while.

I clashed with my mom's boyfriend, Paul. He had squandered his life on a career beneath his intelligence, and it had left him angry. While I was constantly busting my ass, his sole ambition was to catch a buzz and do as little as possible. He liked me, as he saw his past self in me. I hated him, as I saw my future self in him. We got into screaming matches, nearly coming to blows one night.

I clashed with my boss. Meal breaks were a scam to have you clock out when it was slow so you'd be stuck there a half hour longer. I never took meal breaks, just snatched bites of a sandwich between orders. My manager told me I had to take a meal break, then took my time card and punched me out. I left my hat, scarf, and cook's shirt in a pile on the floor and walked out. I got a job at a moving company run by an ex-member of an Aryan gang. He'd been shot in the head by a cop and become a Christian in prison. He worked us brutally hard. Stumbling in after my third fourteen-hour day in a row, I noticed my hair was frosted gray with dried sweat.