I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (21 page)

“Did . . . did you cheat on me?” Allison said, her voice trembling out of the darkness.

Allison loved me, and I loved her. I knew that she didn't want to believe that I had betrayed her. I knew that I could lie to her face, that I could tell her, no, I hadn't, and how could she think that? I knew I could manipulate her, that I could partly force her and partly trick her into believing that something she knew to be true was a lie. And I knew that to make her believe a lie would be an evil thing to do to someone you loved.

“Yes,” I said, “and I'm so sorry.”

I'd never said a word to Allie about Riley, and it had eaten at me. Coming clean about this was the right thing to do, one lonely right thing in the sea of wrong things I'd done. And that small right thing was our undoing.

That spring, the people I loved the most in the world had my dream come true for them without me: the band Allison played in with my best friend James—my ex-band!—signed to a major label. They were at practice; they were in the studio; they were on tour. Allison had little time for our music and less time for me.

The Knitting Factory hadn't totally fired me, but I had been demoted from night manager to security, then found myself having to beg just to get on the schedule. My record—mostly love songs I had written to Allison while on the road—had stalled.

I felt like I had fallen down a well, a well so deep it led to hell. What was worse, I could see a tiny circle of sky and hear the sounds of the living world. I saw Allison for a couple of hours each week—I could smell her delicate blond hair; I was even infrequently allowed
to touch her translucent skin—but she wasn't there. We had sworn we were going to live together, die together, forever and ever! And now Allison had disappeared, like Speck had disappeared, like Riley had disappeared.

No, that's not right. Allison was playing shows, going on tour, doing photo shoots with my best friend James, who I never heard from anymore. Allison was right there in front of me, bolder and brighter than she'd ever been. It was me who was disappearing. I could see it in her face: each day I was a little meeker, a little smaller, a little feebler, until one day I would disappear altogether, and she would finally be free to go on with the rest of her life. Chilling as it must be to watch someone die, it must be more chilling to watch yourself die in her eyes.

Allison and I split. And “split” is the right word. I felt like a Siamese twin torn from its other half. In the middle of the night, I packed up my stuff and moved onto a friend's broken futon in Greenpoint.

I struggled to keep it together. Eben got me another job at a new club on Ludlow Street named Pianos. I started playing bass in a band called Beat the Devil. I went deep into credit card debt to finish my solo record.

I slept with the singer in Beat the Devil, and the band careened out of control. I got into a drunken argument with the label dude from In Music We Trust, and he declined to put out the record. I got fired from Pianos. Again, I bottomed out. Again, I got sober.

I found an apartment with a random gay dude from Craig's List named Esteban. I got a temp assignment. I felt lost and afraid, so I worked hard, as I had always done. My temp assignment turned into a lucrative but meaningless desk job, cooking the books for a crooked general contracting firm that did renovations in the Bloomingdale's building. When I had paid off the credit card debt I had accrued, I offered to send some money home to my mother. But while I was frittering away my student loan money and failing as a singer/songwriter, she had been on the upswing. She'd left
Paul and moved to California. Selling time-shares there had made her enough money that she even bought a condo.

I should have been happy for her. But by saving herself when I had failed to, my mother had undone my raison d'être. By apologizing, my father had robbed me of the nemesis I had been striving to best. I couldn't be angry at him now—he called me at least three times a year! Or maybe just twice. Tatyana had made the grand gesture of naming her first child after me, but when I was on my endless tour, she'd kicked me out of her house, and we'd again stopped talking. Every time I thought of Tashina, I reminded myself that I owed her a phone call. But what I needed to say—I know that, though I swore I'd never abandon you, that's exactly what I've done—was too hard, and the phone call stayed unmade. I burrowed back into alcohol.

But in short order, it wasn't just alcohol. Long hours hunched over a tiny makeshift desk at work aggravated the fickle vertebrae I had injured when I was seventeen. A girl got me started on Vicodin, then Percocet, then Oxycontin. The painkillers did little for the pain, but the high got me through my workdays. My on-off relationship with Shilpa, the singer from Beat the Devil, had turned abusive, so Klonopin and Xanax got me through the nights when she ranted and raged, throwing bottles and mics at my head.

The anniversary of the shooting, then Christmas, then New Year's, then my birthday came and went with no card or phone call or my email from my father. I sent him a card with $20 in it for Father's Day, baiting him: #1 DAD! He didn't respond. Fuck him, anyway. It had been a mistake to try again with him; it was always a mistake. Best to just cut it off clean and walk away. Trying to have a relationship with him, best-case scenario, was a sentence of life in prison without parole. Why fuck around? I'd take a good, honest execution, just get on with it and get it over with, thank you very much.

I managed to patch things up with In Music We Trust, and in the fall of 2007
How to Make a Bad Situation Worse
, the record I had
nearly killed myself to make, finally came out. Nothing happened. I did a national tour, only able to book shows as “the bass player from Beat the Devil.” Nothing happened. Beat the Devil broke up.

A part-time girlfriend gave me a full scrip's worth of Opana. Those little pink pills—they looked like cherry-flavored Sweet Tarts—were a dream come true, a vastly superior way to escape myself. Opana cut up beautifully, nothing like that gravelly aspirin-and-Clorox cocaine I strained to get up my nose in bar bathrooms, no coating to scrape off like with Oxycontin. The postnasal drip even tasted good: chemical-like (which I didn't mind) but also slightly sweet. Like Sweet'N Low.

Alcohol, by that point, only made me feel normal. It slightly lifted my spirits and cleared my mind enough that I could string a sentence together and sometimes even crack a joke. My problem wasn't that I was drinking too much; it was that I couldn't drink enough. Alcohol no longer made me feel good; it just made me feel not bad. But snorting Opana made me feel like those old, corny oil paintings of Jesus where he is not just bathed in light but illuminated from within. A couple of lines of that shit, and my body was bursting with love. I could perform miracles, heal with the touch of a hand.

Opana wasn't cheap, but who cared? I was paid well, in cash, off the books. And these bills, they weren't wages. You earned wages at a job. At a job, you learned skills, you made something, you exerted yourself, and you moved forward. I falsified documents with Wite-Out and pencils and a scanner, expended the least amount of energy possible in order to rip off our contractors—men with jobs, men who performed work, men who actually built things. My weekly payout was just a kill fee for my wasted life. When my boss put the thick envelope in my hand each Friday, I felt a base thrill mottled with shame, as if it weren't money at all but some particularly carnal pornography, fascinating as it was repellent.

Money could never buy what I wanted: revenge, the hatred and fear of the public, Allison. So I bought what it
could
buy: drugs. How much do I want? Well, how much have you got?

I cut up line after line of pink powder with my work ID for the Bloomingdales building, hoovered them with rolled-up yellow Post-its I'd stolen, pointlessly, from the office, and nodded off in incredibly strange positions. Taking off my clothes and getting into bed became mutually exclusive: I either slept in my bed with my coat and shoes on or naked in the hallway.

I woke up for work in the mornings with bemused surprise: Wow. Made it through another night. More than once, I found myself shuffling to work on Monday morning wearing the same clothes I'd left in on Friday. I was on time, and my work got done, so my boss rolled with it.

I quit Opana and then published a cavalier, remorseless account of my romance with it in the
New York Press
. Friends I hadn't heard from in years wrote to me, wondering if I was okay; total strangers created blank online profiles just so they could write to me to give me the number for Narcotics Anonymous. I wrote back to everyone, assuring them all that I was okay: it wasn't something I did; it was something I had done and was now finished with.

I was invited to meet Dave Blum, the editor in chief at the
New York Press
. I was a good writer with interesting subject matter, he told me over dinner, and he would use me as much as he could. He had an agent he wanted me to meet, as it sounded like I had a book in me. Finally, I was a writer. I might yet do some good thing with my life. I celebrated my progress by filling another Opana scrip at the Union Square Kmart.

My aggressive apathy at work finally paid off. On the first day of spring, a Thursday, my boss let me know that Friday would be my last day. I felt anger and terror. Was I supposed to beg, to wheedle, to plead for an explanation? I laughed and said, “Okay.”

I burst through the door to my apartment that night, furiously crushed up a couple of pills of Opana, stuck my rolled-up bill in the chunky pink powder, and snorted as hard as I could. As the drug came on, I sank to the floor, overflowing with righteous fury and chemical bliss.

When I awoke from my nod, I dragged myself to a bar and went home with a girl I'd met at a show. Alone in her bathroom, I got colossally high. The next day, Friday, I showed up to work on the nod. They gave me my last envelope after lunch and sent me home early—“home” in this case being the Midtown apartment of my drug supplier. We did lines off her parents' antique furniture, fucked on their white leather sofa. We ground up Oxy and Opana and Adderall and coke, mixed it into a huge multicolored line, then did “Lady and the Tramp,” with her starting at one end and me at the other. When we met in the middle, we collapsed laughing, naked, then high-fived. Junkies rock!

I awoke that night on the street in Brooklyn, bleeding from my forehead. When I made it to my feet, I saw a yellow cab. I raised my hand to flag it down. The taxi slowly became a police car, and as I slowly lowered my arm, it slowly drove past.

CHAPTER 7

The End of the End

W
hen the housing bubble burst in early 2008, my mother's good fortune burst with it. Her sales slowed, then died, then was let go. A year after her peak prosperity, she was on the verge of losing the home she'd only been able to buy by grinding for fifteen years after losing our family home in New Hampshire. I was still so enraged by that public degradation that I was determined to do anything in my power to prevent it happening again. I flew out to California and brought every penny I had—$10,000—to my mother so she wouldn't lose her home. She declined the money. My life's savings, the sum of all the wealth I had accrued in my time on the planet, wasn't enough to save her house. God, I had failed and failed and failed.

Instead, she recruited me to sell her belongings on Craig's List before she got kicked out, a humiliation with which I was by now intimately familiar. The last day of my visit, I was to help my mother move into a room she had rented in her friend's house, like some delinquent teenager.

I sullenly posted ads on Craig's List for the furniture she had bought while she was flush: a set of overstuffed arm chairs for a loving couple to read in; a red velvet love seat for the lovebirds to
cuddle on while watching a movie; a bed large as an island, enveloping like a cloud, where the lovers would begin and end each day together. It had never happened for her; it would never happen. My mother and her friends, the first wives, had been conned. Each had borne and raised her man's children on the promise of “till death do us part,” then been cast off, discarded like an old stroller, useless now that the last brat could walk and feed himself. My mother, the woman I loved more than any other, more than
every
other, more than any other being on the planet . . . no good man would ever love her. The good men had kept their promises and stayed married. The successful men had bought new women, women half their age. If my mother's loneliness became too much, Mom would take a man like me: A failure. A loser. A critically flawed man-child.

I posted and reposted her ads all day long, fuming in silence. The instant my mother went to sleep, I railed thick, chalky lines of Opana and chugged her box wine, as I had when I was a kid, then stumbled around her house, gawping at her belongings, as enraged as I was impotent.

When my mom accidentally threw away my hoarded Xanax, I pitched such a tantrum that she not only went through the trash looking for it, she then begged some Valium for me the next day off a girl she knew from work. Wow, I thought, I've even got Mom scoring drugs for me now.

We got drunk playing Scrabble one night, and my mother expressed concern that I was going to kill myself.

“Mom, I promised when I was a kid, and I promise again,” I said. “As long as you continue to live, so will I.”

“And when I'm gone?”

“Well, you won't be around to bust my chops for breaking a promise, will you?”

She smiled at me sadly. “Well, I plan on living to be ninety, so you'll be sixty by then. You may be ready to go.”

“We can catch the same bus.”

“Two for one. Kids ride free.”

We made light of it in the moment, but it depressed the hell out of me. My own mother seemed resigned to the fact that, best-case scenario, she and I would be kicking off at the same time.

When I got back to New York, I returned to that living death, the working life. I begged my way into a job at another construction company in Queens as office manager, a position with more responsibility than the gig I'd previously been fired from. My lack of qualification for the job was only outmatched by my lack of desire to actually perform it.

After a straight month of subpar performance, I got bumped back to a tiny, unheated, windowless office flooded with an inch of standing water. In the move, I found a file cabinet drawer of expired cough syrup samples. Anything cherry-flavored makes me gag from drinking too much cough syrup as a teenager, but these were grape flavored. They got me through a couple of idle weeks.

High on morphine one night, I got a call from the iconoclast comedian Doug Stanhope. He'd heard my songs, he said as I listened in stoned disbelief, and he was a fan. He brought me out on the road, opening for his bleak “fetish comedy” with my songs of drunken-hearted despair. I played to the biggest crowds of my life. People started clapping before I'd even finished—clapping for
me
. I churned out a couple more bleak, druggie dispatches for the
New York Press
to accolades from my friends and even a couple of fan emails. I sold hundreds of dollars' worth of T-shirts and CDs; I took photos with fans; I signed autographs. People picked fights with me; one guy even took a swing at me. I'd been waiting for this my entire life.

These occasional debauched weekends on the road made work bearable, and they made it unbearable. I imagined Stanhope as a foulmouthed, mushroom-gobbling Tinker Bell, silently sprinkling some powder of indeterminate origin in my hair as I hunched over
a desk, then whisking me off to a depraved, hedonistic Neverland of free drinks, free drugs, applause and adoration and autographing boobs. Too soon, I was neatly deposited back in front of my hated computer monitor, my pen caddy, my monthly desk calendar, always coming down from something.

One of my most cherished moments was getting booed at the end of my set in Seattle, only to have Doug bound up on stage and come to my defense: “Hey, Fatty! Yeah, you, the date rapist in the back, booing my friend. What do you do for a living,
file shit
? Mishka's a fucking
artist
, man.” The crowd roared with laughter. My chest burned with pride. Days later, I was back at work, filing shit. It was funny, funny in a way that made me want to jam my fingers in the paper shredder so I could never work again.

Finally, my chaos alienated even Stanhope. He had been a little thrilled when he found out I was every bit the drunken mess my songs promised. Had that thrill diminished when they held back some of his pay to cover a table I couldn't recall breaking? Or when the club had to call the cops in Portland? Or was that Tacoma? Was it when I had to retain a criminal lawyer? Or was it just the same thing that had plagued me my whole life, that I was almost good enough but not quite?

After one particularly chaotic trip, the show offers stopped coming. Then Stanhope stopped calling. Then he stopped picking up my calls. Then he had a new opener. The carnival never stopped, but if you were careless, it left town without you. Doug was going on with his life. I was left to deal with mine.

My roommate Esteban worked as a dispatcher for a gay escort service and did phone sex from the apartment. I felt for him. Poor fucker was surrounded by sex but unable to get any for himself. In the nearly three years we had lived together, he had never had a dude over. The muffled human sounds that occasionally seeped out of his room—were those pornography or him crying? I couldn't decide which I found more repellant: the thought of my morbidly
obese roommate masturbating to gay porn or a human being feeling an honest emotion in such close proximity.

Esteban ate terribly—White Castle and TV dinners and heaping plates of fried chicken, plantains, greasy rice and beans—and his weight steadily increased. Esteban blacked out on the toilet, naked, his long black hair hiding his face. Esteban vomited in the bathtub and didn't clean it up. Esteban locked himself out one night, so he smashed a window in order to get back in, badly cutting his arm. Another night, he showered drunk, then opened the wrong door on his way back to his room and fell down two flights of stairs. Our eighty-year-old landlady, Doris, found him at the base of the stairs, naked, bleeding, and barely conscious.

Esteban wasn't all bad. He was friendly to the ragged parade of sad women trooping in and out of my half of the apartment. Like me, he sang in the shower. My sympathy for his situation was not entirely destroyed by having to live with him. We had a kind of grim understanding, like characters in a Beckett play: each of us deserved the mute horrors of the other.

Bleak as my life was, I knew I had to succeed at my job. But work was impossible. I was useless for hours of the workday, sweating and nauseated and lightheaded. My mother had sacrificed so much for me. It was time for me to sacrifice for her. Just be the good son, I told myself, and get it together.

I finally did some research on my magic bullet, Opana. It was a Schedule II synthetic opiate more powerful than Oxycontin, morphine, and pharmaceutical heroin. Indeed, Opana was so treasured by junkies and other opiophiles that it had been pulled off the market in the 1970s after a string of pharmacy robberies. In the 1989 Gus Van Sant movie
Drugstore Cowboy
, Opana was the pharmacy bandits' drug of choice. A commenter on an opiate message board wrote, “I've been shooting heroin for 27 years and I've never had anything like this.” What had I gotten myself into? I would kick it, cold turkey.

Removing painkillers from your life means inserting pain. My back knotted, then seized. I writhed my sheets into wet vines at night, gulping handfuls of Advil and Aleve, unable to sleep. Each night that passed, I grew more and more exhausted but somehow never got so tired that my body could take the sleep it needed. I felt possessed, like my skeleton was writhing under my flesh. I was visited so often by phantoms—a hanged man; an impossibly tall faceless man in a dark robe; the skeleton of a child; a dancing, empty dress; a drowned twelve-year-old boy, naked except for a dripping hooded sweatshirt—that I half convinced myself that my room was haunted.

The pressure I put on myself to succeed at my job failed to motivate me to work hard. It only made me hate myself when I couldn't force myself to try. My boss threw money at me, but I couldn't be paid to care. The nihilist in me rose up, and I decided to see how long I could go without doing any actual work, trying to make my situation completely unbearable in hopes that something would happen, anything. Finally, I made it through an entire day without doing a single work-related thing. Nothing happened. I quit in disgust.

The day before a December show with Rumanian Buck, a band I'd started with Aaron and Chen, my two most constant friends, I swung by the Christmas party at Pianos for “just one beer.” I progressed rapidly, from beer to shots of Jameson, to bumps of coke, to drinking late into the morning with the metal security gate pulled down, to a near-fistfight with a cab driver who refused to take me over the bridge into Brooklyn. I glanced at the clock in my room when I finally shuffled in. My “just one beer” had concluded at 11:55 the following morning, fourteen hours and over $120 later.

I woke up in the early afternoon, still drunk, unable to get back to sleep. I kept drinking. It was the only way I was going to make it through the show that night at Santo's Party House.

I took one of those big twenty-milligram Adderalls once I got to the club. Just before we went on, I snorted the blow still in my jeans pocket from the night before. Remaining upright was a challenge if I stood in one place, but as long as I kept moving, I was okay.

The show was fine. It's not like it was my first time playing fueled by chemicals alone. Chen's guitar was too loud, but it covered up any changes I may have muffed.

Afterward, Chen threw me the keys to his van. He was wasted and going home with some girl. Fine, I was okay to drive. Or at least more okay than usual.

When I went outside to bum a cigarette, a girl with pale skin and pale blue-green eyes was leaning on a rail, drawing angrily on a Parliament. Her hair was bleached so white it was nearly gray, trailing down to the middle of her back like mist. She'd been at one of our other shows, chasing Aaron around, shitfaced. I'd stared at her tight jeans and thought,
I
deserve that girl.

She turned her eyes up at me when I walked outside.

“You're hot,” she rasped.

“You're hot,” I dumbly returned.

She blew out a lungful of smoke.

“You wanna go?” she said.