I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (2 page)

But now, I was not who I was. I had been sober for three months. Whenever I bumped into people I knew, they commented on how good I looked or asked what was different about me. It was nice, but it was meaningless. We were all waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'd made it three months before, showered and gotten my hair cut, found a new job . . . then turned around and cannonballed right back into the pool of filth I'd crawled out of.

I was in agony by the time I hit the ramp up the Williamsburg Bridge. I was gushing sweat and could feel my chubby thighs chafing against each other, my boxer shorts so soaked it felt like I was wearing a wet diaper. My T-shirt was drenched, binding and rubbing in my armpits. Every couple of steps, a fresh drop of salty sweat trickled onto the abraded flesh, searing like a bite from a fire ant. I slowed but refused to allow myself to walk.

My father had been a runner. Didn't that mean I should have the genes for it? But then, I also lacked my dad's mechanical aptitude, his math brain, his intuitive understanding of physics, his diligence, his focus, everything.

My dad had done a near infinite number of things that I would never do. At fourteen, having already read the Bible, the encyclopedia, and every other book in the house, he read the dictionary. I didn't make it through the
A's
. At eighteen, Dad tore a 1936 Ford Coupe completely apart—every nut, every bolt—cleaned every single part, and then put it back together. Even now, I could barely muddle through an oil change. My father's university added a wing so that he could continue his physics experiments. I had to plead with my college not to kick me out days before I was to graduate. Dad could crack walnuts with his bare hands; Dad had had his pocket picked and caught the thief; Dad had been spied on and caught the spy; Dad had shot top-secret things into outer space and blown them up with motherfucking laser beams for the government, for Christ's sake. As my father had mastered doing cool things, I had mastered doing nothing.

I could remember watching him come home from a run when I was only four. He ran up our driveway, his massive chest heaving, his white T-shirt soaked, his dark hair, mustache, and eyebrows a dramatic black from perspiration. He peeled off his headband and wrung it out, his sweat splattering noisily on the blacktop. What a magnificent creature he was, his huge, strong, hairy hands, his bristly mustache . . . I even marveled at the way the bathroom stank after he had used it. Dad was something between a human being and an animal, greater than either, greater than both: a mythological beast. My father sweat so much, you could wring his headband and T-shirt into a glass and drink it! My tiny body didn't sweat at all. Even as a child, I understood running was only one of the many things he did that I would never be able to do. I was the mortal offspring of an immortal.

As I crested the Williamsburg Bridge, there it was: The City. Even after 9/11, the primacy of the Manhattan skyline was unchallenged. I recalled an old Soul Coughing line: “You can stand on
the arms of the Williamsburg Bridge, crying ‘hey man, this is Babylon.'” When I moved to New York, I was convinced the city held some special destiny for me, that I was destined to do something . . . well, at least something memorable if not brilliant or amazing. Now it was over.

The City wasn't over:
I
was over. New York was
possibility
. I could have done anything. Then, almost imperceptibly, my prospects had faded, my options had dwindled. I'd moved seamlessly from promising to failed. New York still shone; it was still the city where dreams became real—but only if you pursued them. I'd had trouble keeping sheets on the bed.

My conviction at twenty-one—that I was special—hadn't been just bland or commonplace but utterly banal, the most mundane and flawed conviction ever. Sure, we were all special, every one of us: the hunchbacked old man working at Kinko's, the fat girl at the pet store, the weed delivery guys on battered ten-speeds, the people selling term papers or Adderall or worn panties on Craig's List, the guys pushing stolen shopping carts overburdened with scrap metal, the tired illegals selling water or Gatorade at stoplights, the bar-backs, the servers, the escorts, the doormen, the janitors, the cleaning ladies, every junkie, every addict, every alcoholic, every single one of us.

Another song lyric crawled unbidden into my head, from the Pogues's “Fairytale of New York”: “I could have been someone. / Well, so could anyone.” I had scored two free tickets to the Pogues on St. Patrick's Day. The tickets weren't just free, I was to write about the band. I was getting paid to go and see the Pogues! I brought my friend Fisher, another struggling musician. We snuck in coke and whiskey, got shitfaced, then bailed during the last song to dodge the thick scrum that would soon form at the exits, off-duty cops who'd been drinking all day and meathead Jersey amateurs in plastic green top hats and shamrock beads.

We'd spilled out into the street together, arms around each other's necks, crowing with pleasure. Free tickets! Cheap whiskey! Fuck the cops! We were gaming the system! We were making it!

Fisher overdosed a couple of years later in a tiny, overpriced Williamsburg apartment. We hadn't even been able to scrape together a benefit show for him.

My shoulders prickled like someone was drawing tiny shards of broken glass out through my pores. My mouth was so dry it felt like it had been stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. A sticky white film coated my tongue, and when my sweat dripped into my mouth, it mixed with the film and tasted like bile. I wheezed, and my lungs stung as if I'd inhaled some poisonous vapor. My thighs throbbed, then burned till I prayed for them to just seize so I would be forced to stop.

The only logical thing to do was give up. Quit my job—if there was one word to describe my professional life in New York, it was “replaceable”—give my landlord notice, sell my shit, and then . . . what? After years of silence, I'd exchanged a few tentative emails with my father, but I knew I wasn't welcome there. My mother had lost her house in the California real estate bubble of 2008 and was crashing on my older sister Tatyana's floor. My little sister Tashina was barely scraping by. I had failed so badly, I couldn't even give up.

Something catastrophic was coming—a heart attack, a stroke, a brain aneurysm. Had I finally complained myself to death? Bring it on, then. Let's get this over with. My skull filled with the white noise of my spasming heart and my whistling breath.

But the bridge was now sloping down into Manhattan. That yammering voice in my head went abruptly silent. I relaxed a little as gravity pulled me forward. As I plodded up First Avenue
toward 14th Street, I felt nauseous and lightheaded and sore, but also giddy, as if someone had strangled me nearly to death and then, at the last second, loosened his grip and spared my life.

My heart soared when I saw my bike chained to the light pole outside Beauty Bar. I had said I was going to run to get my bike. I had actually done it. I bought a bottle of water at the closest bodega and quickly sucked it down, squatting in the shade, then slowly biked home.

I was stepping out of the shower before I noticed that the rage that had woken me had disappeared completely, like it had been surgically removed.

As an adult, I avoided looking at my body. Now, I forced myself to look.

Shoulders scattered with bad or unfinished tattoos. My torso crisscrossed with scars, most concealed or nearly concealed by the tattoos. Beer belly and love rungs hanging off my front and sides, but less than before. I wasn't just fooling myself. A couple of months of biking to work, doing some push-ups and not drinking, and my alcoholic tubbiness had gone down considerably. Under that receding layer of blubber, maybe muscles were growing? It wasn't even approaching good . . . but I looked better than I had before.

I stared at myself in the mirror. Dark, unkempt hair like a drowned crow lying on my head. My face blotchy red and white from the effort of my run. Though I'd dried my face three times, sweat still poured out of me. But I no longer had that “cornered animal” look I had gotten used to. My body was still in a blind panic, fervently trying to recover from the exertion, but my eyes looked almost serene. As torturous as the run had been, I felt strangely at peace.

People had been accusing me of wanting to kill myself since I was a kid. I only ever wanted to kill half of myself—the good half, the half that, against logic, kept hoping, kept trying, kept caring. I'd gotten everything else wrong—maybe I'd just picked the wrong side?

In exhaustion and wonder, I looked up the distance from my house to Beauty Bar. I had run nearly five miles without stopping.

I had run that far once before, when I was thirteen. I tried to remember it. It felt like a lifetime ago. But almost twenty years later, it had mysteriously happened again. My life seemed to shift a few degrees. New possibilities had only been negative for a long time—it was possible that I would wind up in rehab; it was possible that I would wind up in jail. On my run, some invisible divider had cracked and then shattered. It was now possible that I could do good things too.

CHAPTER 2

Chemical Youth

A
lcohol is written into my family's genetic code. My parents were poor farm kids from Saskatchewan, Canada. Three of my four grandparents died from alcoholism. I don't remember my first drink. Apparently, my folks got a giggle out of watching me slurp down the last drops of my dad's beer when I was a toddler. “It was a cultural norm then,” my mom said when I quizzed her about it. “We all had pictures of our kids with beer cans to their lips. God, I can't tell you how many times I've thought back to that and wondered if we weren't making a huge mistake.”

My parents sometimes put a little wine in our apple juice at dinner. I couldn't have been seven then. Uncle Albert, my mother's youngest brother, slipped me a couple of rum-and-Cokes on the sly at a family reunion when I was nine, a trespass for which I think my mom is still mad at him. But my first drunk was on seven Budweiser tall boys when I was thirteen. That's where it all began.

We moved to New Hampshire from New Mexico in the winter of my eighth-grade year. We had followed my father, a nuclear physicist and our sole provider, to Kingston, New Hampshire, as we had
followed him from Ontario, Canada, to Los Alamos, New Mexico, five years earlier. He was the eldest child and only son, fawned over by his mother, grilled relentlessly by his father. Whether doted on or cut down, he was the center of the universe, and his sister, Marilyn, came a distant second. When he returned to his father's farm with his PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, his father said, “Don't think this makes you any better than us.”

The second of seventeen children, my mother had always been a mother, minding the children under her, practically raising the youngest as her own. She was independent, the first in her family to get a college degree. She created a small stir in our tiny town by keeping her maiden name when she married, but she had always known she would have children. She had wanted to have “only six,” she told us. She seemed to have her hands full with half that.

Tatyana maintained a hurt silence nearly the entire, days-long December drive to our new life in Kingston. Two years older than I, she'd been popular in Los Alamos, got good grades, and had a boyfriend who skated and drove a pickup with oversize tires. She'd always been getting picked up or dropped off, swapping clothes with her friends, GUESS and Vuarnet and JIMMY'Z, and talking on her Swatch phone for hours. She was distraught about being plucked from her high school clique in the middle of her sophomore year. Not that I cared. Tatyana and I had been embroiled in a cold war for years.

Our grueling cross-country move was just another road trip adventure for my sister Tashina. She was eight, four years younger than I, my mother's brother's child. She'd come to live with us when she was four because her parents couldn't afford to look after her. She was Native American, adopted, and wore hearing aids, which made her unforgivably bizarre to other kids her age. I worried for her.

I worried for me too. My transition from Canada to New Mexico had not gone smoothly. My first day, my teacher made a big production of stopping the Pledge of Allegiance because I wasn't
standing up with my hand over my heart. No one had told me! I stood up, but I didn't say anything, because I knew she couldn't make me. Instantly, I became that weird kid from that weird country that had something to do with hockey. Did I speak Canadian? Did we still have dirt floors?

I had skipped a grade and was in the gifted program, a freak even among the freaks. “Potential” was a word frustrated teachers often deposited on my report cards, a word I came to hate: “Mishka has such potential, it's a shame that his performance is marred by behavioral issues and lack of focus.” Such a bullshit word. Finally, I looked it up: “showing the capacity to develop into something in the future.” Something good? Something bad? It just meant that, right now, I was nothing. When I was nine, I started having panic attacks. When I was ten, I started cutting myself.

By seventh grade, my awkward entry had compounded into genuine alienation. I couldn't skate, and I sucked at sports despite my size. I didn't have the confidence to wear clothes I thought were cool, so I wore my dad's old clothes or clothes from the thrift store. I thought I looked tough. I probably looked like an aspiring hobo.

I was the tallest in my class, but I'd become a target for bullies who recognized I lacked the sense of self to fight back. I got beat up on the bus to school or between classes. My lunch got stolen so frequently that I started bringing two. They just took them both. During one lunch break, I was held down, and my shoes were stolen off my feet. I got jumped by a ninth grader after school, and he cracked my new glasses. I'd broken down in tears, which only made it worse.

By eighth grade, I felt I deserved to be alone. When the possibility of leaving New Mexico came up, I was all for it. I knew nothing of New Hampshire, but anywhere was better than here. I didn't tell anyone we were moving, just downgraded myself one notch from “ignored” to altogether absent.

Mom had always been my first and best friend. It wasn't unusual for her to draw open the curtains while we were eating breakfast before school and say, “You know what? It's far too nice a day for you kids to go to school. Run and get ready, we're going cross-country skiing.” Or to the beach. Or berry picking, us kids just eating what we picked, my mom taking off her halter top (“So I can get some sun,” she said) in the privacy of the berry patch and filling pails with blueberries for muffins and pies. Mom had always been my protector: dragging me out of an apple tree I'd climbed when I was six while she was photographing the mother bear and cubs in the next tree for the town paper; standing up for me when I got kicked out of Cub Scouts for fighting; stunning us kids into silence and then hysterical laughter when she told the lady at the gas station to “fuck off” for calling me a retard when I was nine; standing up for me when I got kicked off the swim team; taking me to get my ear pierced at the mall in sixth grade when I got suspended from school; driving me to school each morning when the bullying on the bus got out of control.

But even this had soured. The summer before we left New Mexico, my mother took off her shoe to whack me for some vile thing I had said to Tatyana. We struggled, and I took the shoe away. I was 5'10" and already towered over her. We stood there in the hallway to my bedroom, staring at each other, neither of us knowing what to do, a pair of actors who had gone off script and had no idea what to say or who to be.

The lone ray of light that bleak winter was Chuong.

A new kid had appeared in my sixth-grade class one morning. He was Asian, a couple of inches shorter than me, well muscled but with a finer structure. Chuong was from Vietnam, our teacher explained, and he had just arrived in America. He had endured a dangerous boat ride and then spent two years in a refugee camp in Malaysia. He was fourteen, a couple of years older than us, but he
spoke little English, so he would study with our class. We were to make him feel welcome.

When we all stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, he stayed seated, his head down.

“Chuong,” I said under my breath.

He looked at me.

I gestured for him to stand, and he did. While the rest of the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, Chuong stood there silently, not speaking. Like me.

My teacher pulled me aside at lunch. The new boy had moved in across the street from me with an uncle he didn't know. Could I try to befriend him? That night, after dinner, I went over to call on him.

A tall, thin, stern Vietnamese man answered the door. Chuong had run away, he told me. That quick, huh? Well, which way did he go? Chuong's uncle pointed to his left, up the street.

It was dark by the time I caught up with Chuong, walking stiffly upright in Bugle Boy pants, a long-sleeve plaid shirt, a green baseball hat perched high on his head, and flip-flops. I fell into step with him.

He spoke almost no English, and I spoke no Vietnamese, but he was able to communicate to me that he had a friend in Houston. He was going to walk there. The moon was already high in the sky, and it was starting to get chilly.

I stopped him and went down on one knee on the sidewalk. Chuong dropped to his haunches next to me. I put one little stone down.

“Uncle. Yes?” I said.

He nodded his head.

I took another little rock and held it up for him to see.

“Chuong. Yes?”

Again he nodded.

I made a walking gesture with the fingers on one hand to signify walking for a long time and then put the stone down about a
quarter of an inch away from the Uncle stone. I grabbed a third, larger stone and held it up for him.

“Houston. Yes?”

Again, Chuong nodded, cocking one eyebrow at me, curious.

I stood up and threw the rock as far as I could down the street. We watched it bounce once and then disappear into the darkness. Chuong looked at me, his eyes wide.

“Ahhh,” he said, crestfallen.

“It's
really
far,” I said. “Really, really,
really
far.”

He let out a deep sigh. We turned around and headed home.

Chuong was a marvel. He could outrun anyone, and in flip-flops. He could fart on command. He'd grown up on the streets of Saigon, and his body was covered in scars, a slash across his chest where he'd been cut with a sharpened key and an ugly star on his forehead where he'd been hit with a bottle. My mother told me that people had committed suicide on the boat to Malaysia by throwing themselves overboard because the conditions had been so bad. It was whispered that Chuong had only been sent on to America because he and some friends had ganged up on and killed a guard in the refugee camp who had been abusing them. His life was so cool, vastly superior to my boring life of spelling homework and cleaning the cat litter.

Chuong's uncle had little patience for the nephew he didn't know, so Chuong slept at our house more than at his home, cooking mountains of egg rolls for us on the weekends. Chuong taught me how to make weapons out of scrap metal, how to shift your center of gravity when running so no one could catch you, and how to tattoo yourself with a pencil, a sewing needle, and ashes. I taught him how to speak English by explaining heavy metal songs on the radio, sitcoms on TV, and
Police Academy
movies. When we left for school in the morning, he echoed my farewell to my mother: “Bye, Mom!”

In seventh grade, his uncle finally threw him out, and he was assigned to foster care in Albuquerque. My mom and I were heartbroken. Each time we went to visit him, his situation was worse.
He had dropped out of school; then his foster family had kicked him out; then he had run away from the group home. Our last visit, it had taken hours to track him down through his friends. He was thin and gray from smoking more than he ate. He had cut the tip off a finger making jewelry in a sweatshop, then stuck it back on with a Band-Aid.

Our last Christmas in New Mexico, Chuong came to spend a week with us. I spent the entire time lobbying for him to come to New Hampshire with us. My parents finally assented. It only took one visit to his social worker to get permission. Nobody else wanted him.