I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (14 page)

3. Become Successful.
This most likely involved monetizing The Incredible Thing. Shit, I guess this step ruled out self-immolation, which was unfortunate. I knew of only three ways to get a large amount of money. One was armed robbery, but I couldn't bring myself to do guns. Another was craftiness: cracking safes, counting cards, hacking computers, financial wizardry. With my shaking hands, physical dexterity of a three-legged camel with vertigo going downstairs on a pogo stick and roller skates, and track record of never having gotten away with anything ever? Nope. Lastly, big money could be generated by being outrageously lucky. Let's not even kid about that one.

4. Get Revenge.
I'd heard about the process of “making amends,” a part of the Twelve Steps wherein some sorrow-soaked sober souse would write sniveling apologies to everyone he had ever wronged in his life: mother, father, sisters, brothers, friends, bartenders, doormen, motel maintenance staff, every single woman who had ever had the misfortune of having any part of his body inside any part of her body, and so forth. The fourth and final phase of my great plan was an inversion of this process. I would come for everyone who had ever laughed at us: the kids who had mocked Tashina for her hearing aids or her glasses, the men who walked
over her feelings and took her for granted; the flirtier, more confident girlfriends who had used or betrayed Tatyana, preying on her selflessness; every sneering neighbor, every haughty landowner who had ever condescended to my mother because she was working in the supermarket or cleaning his house. I would come for every bully, any bully, every man who had raped or traumatized or abused any of the numerous women I'd known who now lived in pain and fear; the torturers, anyone who had ever taken pleasure in creating pain in another. I would come for every single rich person in the world; every happy, unworried person in every coffee shop; everyone who had had it easy where we had had it hard. I would come for everyone, everywhere. It would take some planning. A pad of legal paper and one of those mechanical pencils would be a good first step. You know, make a list.

What day is it? Do I work tomorrow? I think I work tomorrow. Am I going to be sick if I sit up? I tried to feel down into my tummy without moving. Wow, I was wearing a T-shirt and socks and nothing else. My stomach felt hard and tight. Not good, but I wouldn't be sick, at least not now. Nothing to throw up.

I sat up slowly and reached for the phone. My head felt like someone had broken a bottle inside it. I dialed time and temperature: “At the tone, the time will be 1:39 a.m., December 15, 1997.”

I had slept through the fifth anniversary of the shooting.

A couple of friends would have called, possibly my dad, probably Tatyana, definitely my mom. I checked voice mail.

Nothing. Nothing from my friends. Nothing from my family. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

During the day, I was generally okay. There were people around, and there were limits to how far off the rails you could go in the daylight. Sad, but okay. But at night, and especially alone at night . . .

I had described it to Judah as the Snuffleupagus of Despair. The Snuffleupagus of Despair was like Big Bird's friend who
only visited when there was no one else around, except totally different: terrible, horrible, terrifying, horrifying, isolation made flesh, hot breath that stank of cat urine, long shaggy hair that smelled like a dead wet dog washed up on the beach. To gaze upon the Snuffleupagus of Despair was to lose your mind; to touch it was to fold up inside yourself, asphyxiate in the cold molasses of your own loneliness, and disappear completely. Judah had laughed—we had both laughed there in the kitchen—but even then, laughing together in the sunlight, he understood, and it put fear into his eyes.

I had hidden some bottles around the house, you know, just in case. The pint in my sock drawer was gone. The pint in my desk drawer was gone. I pulled on some boxers and went upstairs and out into the screened-in porch, shivering violently. There, under one of the couch cushions was a pint of Captain Morgan. It was freezing cold. I took a huge, chilly pull off it even before I walked back inside. It tasted like Christmas and pancake syrup and poison.

I went back into my room and wrapped myself up in my blankets, sitting up. I drank. When my dad bailed on us, my mother, my sisters, and I swore that we would stay a family, fuck him. After the shooting at Simon's Rock, my friends and I had sworn that, drunk or sober, high times or hard times, we would always stick together.

I hadn't spoken to anyone from Simon's Rock in how long? Six months? A year? I couldn't remember. I dodged my mother's phone calls—kindness now would only make me crumple. Tatyana and I had barely spoken since the divorce. I never called Tashina, too ashamed of how I'd let her down. We had gone head-to-head with darkness and lost.

I took a knife out of a little cardboard box of crap that sat next to my single futon. I had been cutting myself since I was a child, small, secret slashes on the inside of my arm with razor blades
pilfered from my dad's wood shop. At sixteen, in a fit of loneliness after a fight with my father, I had carved my torso up with a serrated steak knife. A year later, I put a gash in my leg that should have gotten stitches.

I pulled off my shirt. I unfolded the largest blade and drew it down my left breast as hard as I could, then, before I could stop myself, down my right breast. I gasped with the shock of it, then threw the knife away from me. What was next, my face? My wrists?

The wounds yawned open, the flesh obscenely pink and white underneath, but no blood. Shit, I hadn't meant to do that much. Then the blood came, pouring down my chest, gushing through my fingers and into my bed. I grabbed the bottle and drew from it until I ran out of air.

When my alarm went off in the morning, I was stuck to my sheets. I gingerly worked myself free. The twist of tangled, bloody blankets looked like a murdered hooker. I put on a black T-shirt and made my way up to the shower. When I came downstairs, I packed the gaping wounds with Neosporin and did my best to duct tape them shut. Then I got dressed. I had to go to work.

The winter deepened. Mateo and I continued to atrophy in the Well of Misery, though I had the sense to remove every sharp object from my room. A girl in Mateo's drunk-driving class had totaled her car, decapitating her best friend in the front seat. Only a thin sheet of fake wood paneling separated our rooms, so when they got drunk after class and got it on, I could hear every nuance in minute, biological detail. After a few months of listening to them, I felt like I knew Mateo's sperm count.

I had to endure the sounds of them together, but Mateo had to endure the sounds of me alone. When I started crying one night, he knocked gently on the door, then came in with a jar of wine and sat and talked to me for a while. Another night, he knocked gently on the door, came in and put a jar of wine next to my bed, then left.
Another night, he knocked on the door and asked me if I was okay. I said that I was. He said, “Alright. Then shut up,” and walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.

Damon, a gay friend of Judah's girlfriend and our token “normal” roommate, was a grown-up with a real, professional job, but he spent every free hour cruising for ass at Cheesman Park. A steady stream of random dudes wandered through the house, back and forth from his room. It was maddening—sex all around me and just out of reach.

Judah was again unemployed, owed us all money, and only survived by sponging off his mom and his girlfriend. I encountered him in the kitchen several times while I was getting ready for work, wobbling around in his boxers, still up and drinking from the night before though it was eleven in the morning. Slurring his speech, incomprehensible, his sunken chest so white it was almost green. Judah got into a scrap with Sam one night. It's good I had already blacked out, or I might have taken a swing at each of them.

My sadness ebbed, replaced by fearlessness and anger. I accompanied Damon to cavernous gay clubs to take advantage of the hour of free drinks, railed meth off the back of a toilet in the women's room, then made out with dudes for more free drinks. Was I gay? I theorized aloud to Damon how much that would simply my life. He raised one eyebrow, then roughly set me straight: “Yeah, Thanksgiving with my family is a fucking blast. As was high school. You stupid redneck faggot
tourist
.”

Too drunk to walk to the bar one night, I drove. When I returned home later, someone had taken my parking spot, so I rammed his car, then parked down the street. The police woke me up early the next morning. I was high on nutmeg when my court date rolled around but still managed to plead my penalty down to just a fine.

When I was escorted out of the building at my customer service job by security, I dumped my cardboard box of stuff in the trash—purloined Post-it notes, pens, a stapler—and hit the closest liquor
store for some vodka. I woke up several days later with knifing chest pains, feeling not hungover but mortally wounded by alcohol.

I was plagued by a persistent hallucination, more vivid than any I'd had on mushrooms or acid, more disturbing than coming down from meth. When I closed my eyes, I saw a lush, marine garden, pulsing magically in an underwater cavern: swathes of fluorescent anemones glowing like multicolored lava; phosphorescent seahorses that seemed to be made solely of blown glass and light; fish friendly as dogs, bright as parrots, nimble as serpents; enormous alabaster and ebony octopi with not eight but thousands of elegant arms cascading off them, waving, beckoning.

The moment my eyes closed, water rushed against my face. I was sucked into the mouth of the cave and drawn deeper, deeper. When I opened my eyes to keep from drowning, there was an unpleasant shock of returning to my body. The hallucination was too compelling, too inviting, far realer than my flat life of grays and browns.

As my heart stuttered and skidded painfully in my chest, my skin prickled, and my body filled with fear. If I yielded to the beauty of that underwater garden, if I allowed myself to be lured all the way into the cave, my lungs would fill with saltwater, and I would die.

It was tempting. My wounded heart would finally be allowed to rest. The nausea, the headache that never went away, the constant throb from my back injury at Sonic Burger, the phantom pains, the panic attacks . . . It would all be over. Every day, I said it:
I wish I was dead. I should just die. I hope I die in my sleep
. Here was my chance. All I had to do was surrender.

It scared the fucking shit out of me. I didn't drink for an entire week. When I started back up, it was just wine, a bottle or two a night. No more liquor, certainly no meth, no more lost weekends. I fought to keep Riley out of my head.

Things improved marginally as the weather warmed. I took a job as a door-to-door salesman for a sketchy construction company.
I found a couple of girlfriends I alternated between, a girl from the human resources department at my old job and a black stripper. The dismayed looks she got from her family were almost as enjoyable as the dismayed looks I got from my friends. My girls had three kids between the two of them, children they were careful I never met.

I wrote a letter to my father. Our relationship had been solely financial for some time. We rarely spoke, and I hadn't seen him since I was eighteen. He had bailed on the tuition for my final semester, and a two-year-old chiropractic bill I'd sent him four times still hadn't been paid: $51. I informed him that, with him welshing on his most basic commitments, our relationship was over. I would see him at his funeral. I got no response.

I felt different than I had when I'd landed in Denver in the fall, as if something broken inside me had finally knit together and calcified, if at an unnatural angle. I did push-ups every morning and curls every night, drinking alone in my room. I still threw up sometimes, but it was all business, shoving my toothbrush down my throat in the bathroom or puking out the open car door in a Safeway parking lot before a sales call. And then I wiped my mouth, and I closed the fucking deal.

CHAPTER 5

The Graveyard of Dreams

I
moved to New York City in October 1998 with $300. If I hadn't exactly triumphed in Denver, I had survived there long enough to know it was time to get the hell out. New York City had towered in my mind, a noir Shangri-la, slashes of black ink bleeding out of white paper on a page of
RAW
magazine. It was a city built of all the darkness I loved, Burroughs and R. Crumb and Cop Shoot Cop, cockroaches and prostitution and squalor. “I want to be filthy and anonymous,” East Village poet John Giorno had written. You could not do that in San Luis Obispo. You could only do that in New York. When I dreamed of New York, I pinioned wildly between arrogance and insecurity. I would thrive in the City, I would blossom, I would shine. Or I would flame out and disappear, bleed out in a gutter with some eloquent execration dying in my throat.

Paul's son Jesse lived in a musty one-room apartment in a glorified dormitory near Columbia on the Upper West Side. He carved out enough floor space for my dingy single futon, pushed his shirts to one side of the closet, and I moved in.

I had never paid more than $200 in rent. In Denver, we'd had a front yard, a backyard, a garage, a screened-in porch, two fridges, two bathrooms, and an extra room in the basement we did nothing
with. In Manhattan, I paid $300 to share one room with Jesse. No living room, no privacy, communal bathrooms, and a kitchen that stank of fish oil and kimchee.

New York City was glamorous on TV: lights and celebrities and coke and sex in limousines. My New York was broken, dirty, expensive, desperate. The grit in the subway tunnels—it wasn't stylish cross-hatching like in a Frank Miller comic; it was greasy, organic filth, crystallized human urine, rat hair, flakes of dead skin, sebum.

I knew no one and nothing, so I puppy-dogged my old Simon's Rock cronies James and Zack around the East Village and Brooklyn: Rubulad, Life, Spa, Motor City, Mars Bar. I couldn't afford to buy drinks, so I got loaded before leaving the house, then snuck a plastic flask into bars with me. When I had exhausted the flask, I sponged off Jesse, James, Zack, and any other friend within complaining distance until I had exhausted them all. Finally, I downed any unattended half-empty glass I encountered, more than once winding up with a mouthful of cigarette butts for my troubles.

I hinted, I joked, and finally I begged James to let me join his band, COME ON, named after Chuck Berry's first single. I got nowhere. With growing desperation, I loaned the band my amp, a 1960s Fender Super Reverb, and then my guitar, a 1967 Fender Mustang, in attempts to convince my oldest friend of my indispensability as a band member. James remained unswayed.

I had assumed that my college degree would qualify me for some kind of low-level reporting job at a newspaper, but I had no idea how such a job was procured. I was too crippled by insecurity to apply to a single newspaper. Editorial assistant at
Beverage World Magazine?
I couldn't even fake my way through a cover letter. I wasn't qualified for a job; I wasn't qualified to be alive.

I had to do
something
, even if it was just a postponement of the inevitable—winding up in a rehab and then living the rest of my life on my knees. School had held the real world at bay before. Writing papers was less taxing than flipping pancakes, less
demoralizing than answering phones. I asked Jesse what the best writing school in the country was, and he pointed to Columbia, just up the block. If Columbia wouldn't take me, I decided, I'd concede defeat and check in to rehab.

I picked up an application for the writing master's and threw myself into it with abandon. When I wasn't too drunk or hungover to think, I was writing and unwriting and rewriting until the application grew huge in my mind. I scrounged the $75 application fee by doing odd jobs for Jesse's mom in Westchester. Days before I was to send it in, I got a ticket for drinking a forty-ounce on the subway with an accompanying fine of exactly $75. Fuck it, then—I borrowed the money from my girlfriend Shannon's parents. Shortly before midnight on the day of the deadline, I printed the application up, stuffed it in an envelope, ran down to the corner, and dumped it into the mailbox. When the inevitable form-letter rejection came, I'd surrender myself to some grim, state-run facility for a thorough brainwashing.

Finally, James came around. One night at Brownies on Avenue A, he sat me down, bought me a lukewarm Rolling Rock, and asked me to join COME ON. I couldn't even manage to play coy. James had been my best friend since I was fifteen and had often been my only friend, my sole defender. He was simply
more
than me in every way—more confident, older, sharper, more worldly, more talented, ten times the musician I was. It was the ultimate compliment for him to deign to include me in his band. Here was my opportunity to repay him for staying my friend when I had alienated everyone else. I swore to devote myself wholeheartedly to his project, to be as loyal as a dog. Sitting there in our booth at Brownies, I was sure we were on the edge of something enormous.

COME ON didn't just remedy my failures, it inverted them. To be young, naive, hungover, and lonely in New York City is a rotten thing. To be young, naive, hungover, lonely, and playing bass in a rock band in New York City is magnificent. We practiced three or four nights a week at a crappy rehearsal space in South
Williamsburg, five or six hours each night or until we were too drunk to play. Our tour bus would be covered in beaver fur with wheels made of solid cocaine. Our elite security team (to fend off the throngs of screaming fans) would be composed exclusively of pregnant nuns. Our home would be an abandoned Brooklyn fire-house with a polished brass pole that terminated in a hot tub in the basement, with a Taco Bell instead of a kitchen. As I couldn't succeed, James couldn't fail. Together, we were breaking new ground; we were beating a dead horse back to life; we were juvenile gods just beginning to mature into our powers. Someone would notice—how could they not notice? Something would happen. Nothing happened.

I got a call while working at my temp job at Bergdorf Goodman one spring day. I hadn't just been accepted to Columbia. They had awarded me the school's largest scholarship, the Dean's Fellowship. My heart pounding, I got off the call as quickly as I could so I wouldn't get into trouble at work. Even with the scholarship, tuition was still a shitload of money, money I didn't have. I had almost $400 in the bank, the largest bankroll I'd had during my time in the city. My mom made minimum wage, less than I did. Though I never saw a penny from him, my father's income was substantial enough to disqualify me for any kind of economic scholarship. I would probably qualify for student loans . . . but then I would come out of grad school in an even deeper hole than I was currently in. Even before I called my mom, I called James.

“Good job.”

He sounded like he was congratulating me for finding a dollar on the sidewalk.

“Do you think you're going to go? I mean, how would you pay for it?”

That made it easy—I didn't even have to ask him what he thought I should do. Zack was less prickly but openly startled. James was the musician, Zack was the writer, I was the drunken
brute. This Dean's Fellowship bullshit fucked with the hierarchy of our universe. Of the three of us, I was the most unnerved by it.

When I called my mom, she crowed her delight into the receiver. I had to go, she said, and don't even think about the money; opportunities like this come once in a lifetime. I gnawed at myself about it for days. I had to go. I couldn't go. But there is no more devoted gambler than a man who has been serially unlucky. Finally, I called Columbia back. Yes, I was in.

I lasted at Bergdorf's till May, when a dude who looked like poor, murdered Phil Hartman put his head under the bathroom stall door and offered to suck me off. I boldly returned to the scene of the crime the next day, only to encounter a monstrous rope of semen spanning the eighteen inches from the toilet seat to the polished and gleaming marble floor below. Manhattan's crown jewel of retail was more depraved than any truck stop. Despite my boss's protestations that “You have a future here!” I quit the next day and quickly found a marginally less demeaning customer service gig. Progress!

COME ON took every gig we were offered, playing out at least two or three times a month. James's father found us a manager. He did nothing. James's father bankrolled an EP we recorded in Nashville. It did nothing. James's father paid an entertainment lawyer thousands of dollars to walk our demo into the offices of A&R reps. That did nothing.

COME ON went “on tour”—two shows in Massachusetts. We loaded up our girlfriends' cars with our beat-up gear, CDs, T-shirts, and stickers. (We were out to make fans, not money, but it would be inconsiderate to leave our new fans' craving for merch unfulfilled.) Each night, we found our excitement matched with equal or greater ambivalence. We sold one T-shirt. I shared a bottle of whiskey and a foldout couch with the guitar player and woke up soaked in his urine.

Sourly hungover after our Boston show, I convinced Shannon to drive us an hour up to New Hampshire so we could see my old house. As we headed north on I-93, I felt my dread tick slowly up and up and up.

I directed Shannon off the main highway, taking the back way so we could see a little bit of my old gulag. We drove past a small church with a cheap marquis with moveable plastic letters like you see in front of roadhouses but with a more pointed message: THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. REPENT BEFORE PAYDAY.

The roads got smaller and smaller until we were following a barely paved path hardly wide enough for two cars around the shoreline of Powwow Pond. Homemade plastic docks ringed with seaweed floated off the shore like bloated bodies. A woodstove smoldered alone in the middle of a dirt yard in the rain as if its surrounding house had been mysteriously whisked away. Each property line was clearly demarcated, like the tiny lots held national treasures instead of sinking bungalows and rusting trailers: KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY. As we wound our way deeper into the lakeside hamlet, past towering woodpiles and rusting pickups and campers parked among knots of grass, I had the sensation of going underground, into the canted, winding burrows of a rabbit warren. What was my plan? I had no idea.

When we pulled onto 107A, the highway that ran past our old home, I felt like I was going to vomit. Too late to turn back now. Shannon drove slowly toward the bridge by the rope swing. I felt a little chill, but I didn't mention the bridge's significance. What would I say? “I intended to kill myself here once. But I decided suicide would be a mistake. I have since wondered if deciding suicide was a mistake was actually the mistake.” No. We rolled over the bridge and on toward my old house.

Nothing had changed in ten years. No new construction, no new signs, no new grass off the shoulder. No one had even painted their houses.

Our house had been rundown, always too cold or too hot. The basement leaked and stank of mildew and cat piss. But right out our back door, there were miles and miles of woods. John Bakie, the old farmer who lived across the way from us, had sworn to me that he'd never sell the land behind our place as long as he lived. I had fled into the woods nearly every single day. One day I taught my black Lab, Katie, how to eat blackberries off the bushes. She got the low ones, and I got the high ones. We must have stayed out there for hours.

When we rounded the last corner before my old house, I saw that all the woods had been clear-cut and the soil tilled. Nothing grew there at all. Only one tall, lonely tree had been left standing behind our house. It made the barren landscape look more ruined than if there had been no trees at all.

“This is it,” I said. “Pull over. Here.”

Shannon pulled the car over so abruptly it skidded in the dirt. She gave me a scared look.

“Wait here. I'll be right back,” I said and hopped out.

I walked out into the dirt where the woods used to be, toward the lone tree. There was nothing else to walk to. A board was still tacked to its base. Jesus, I remembered this tree. I had made a half-assed attempt to build a tree fort off it. That someone had chosen to spare this specific tree . . . it made me so fucking angry. Was someone taunting me?

Our old house was the only one on the road that had been painted. Not just painted but transformed, from its gloomy, coffee-grounds brown to a sunny daffodil yellow, a perfect contrast to how it made me feel.

I leaned on the tree and stared at the house, my eyes burning. They say you can't go home again, and that's not true. You can, but you will find strangers living there, and they will have changed everything you loved, everything that made the place home to you.