I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (26 page)

Um . . . did you check the ones on top? The ones on the bottom? What about the ones in the back?

“See you in six months,” he said, wiping his hands on the paper bib his assistant had clipped around my neck.

“Guess all those years of drinking mouthwash paid off.”

Not even a smile. Maybe the “cavity search” joke I'd made on the way into his office had pissed him off. Well, no offense, dude, but if I went ten years without a cavity, no way I'm going to endure this every six months. Put me down for sometime in eight years.

At home, I stared at my boyish face in the mirror. Big feminine eyes. Long eyelashes. A bump on my nose from the second time I broke it, in the fight with Zack and Ben White. My skin was no
longer gray, the whites of my eyes no longer yellow, and I'd lost a roll of bloat under my chin. I was still raccoon-eyed, but I'd been like that since I was a kid. For all my egregious, repeated mistakes, my aggressive self-abuse, I appeared unscathed. No kidney damage, no liver disease, blood pressure and heart rate good, no root canal necessary, no painful, humiliating STD, not even a single cavity. What a sham.

I had only ever wanted to live to be seventeen. Turning twenty-one had been a dark relief—I no longer required a responsible adult's consent to get blitzed. Turning thirty had brought a different kind of satisfaction. “Thirty?” a friend had scoffed at me that day. “We didn't think you'd make eighteen.”

Surviving past thirty had been not just an accident but a mistake. I'd reached an age where my friends didn't just die in tragedies—murder, suicide, overdose, drowning—but also from cancer. I had far exceeded my own life expectancy, and, worse, there appeared to be a lot more ahead of me. It seemed bleakly ironic to me that someone who had craved, deserved, and worked so hard to achieve a tragic, early death appeared doomed to live forever.

“You're not indestructible,” my mother had warned me, Jesus, millions of times. I had assented throughout the years, but now I had a final, undeniable rebuttal: there was now actually more evidence against her thesis than for it.

All I had wanted was to be erased. I had been such a self-destructive failure that I had even failed to self-destruct. So where do we go now, Sweet Child o' Mine? There is no Google Maps for your life. There is no clearly marked destination—a red dot—with an illuminated blue line showing where you should go and how you should get there and when you have deviated from the correct path. There is no owner's manual for your life, no Idiot's Guide, not even a shitty map scrawled on a cocktail napkin with nearly illegible directions. And that really sucks.

My anxiety, not especially low in the absence of my various beloved medications, went through the roof. It's much easier to accede to the grim fact of an early death than it is to deal with the long, fumbling open question of what to do with your life.

Tracy Helsing, a bartender who moonlighted as a personal trainer, dragged me to the gym where she worked once or twice a week. She never asked me, just texted me where to meet her and when. At the end of each session, she didn't ask me if I wanted to work out again. She didn't ask me when I was available. She didn't ask me if a specific day or time worked for me.

“Thursday at four.”

“I can't do four. I have . . . a thing.”

“Thursday at two.”

“I . . . Fuck it. Okay.”

“You stand me up, I'll kick your fucking ass.”

Some days she worked out with me. One day, I looked over and saw that she was doing shoulder presses with the same weights I was. My heart jumped. I could lift as much as my trainer! Yes, Mishka, congratulations, you swarthy, macho man, you. With all your hard-won progress, you are now as strong as a girl.

The boys in Freshkills were supportive. Perhaps too supportive. While we were setting up for practice one day, Johnny tuned his guitar, then eyed me.

“Looking real good, Shubaly.”

“Right,” I said.

“No, seriously. Color in your cheeks. Less like a corpse dragged up from the bottom of a reservoir.”

“You trying to fuck me?”

“Maybe later. No, I mean . . . it's really good, what you're doing.” He glanced down at his Pabst Blue Ribbon, then put it down behind his amp. “Should we not drink around you?”

Suddenly, everyone was listening.

“Naw. You didn't create this problem. I did. It's not fair of me to ask you to change what you do. Just don't, you know, offer me a drink or anything.”

Zack shot me a look and grinned.

“Mishka, I haven't offered you a drink in
years
.”

By that summer, my odd jobs and various dead-end gigs had almost totally dried up. I'd pissed away the ten grand I'd saved from my construction gig. I had $70,000 in college debt. I had to do something to make a buck.

I knew nothing of real jobs. I had been fired from all but one of the jobs I'd held in the last six years. I was capable of getting out of bed in the morning now, so, Christ, back to the temp agency? I was proficient in core office skills such as passing the buck, ALTTABing, and looking busy. No, functional alcoholism was the only way to face a forty-hour workweek. Nine-to-fiving it in some soulless cubicle with a Dilbert cartoon over my desk would undo me. Surely I had one marketable skill. I had a master's in fiction . . . so that qualified me to pump gas or squeegee windshields on the corner or round up the shopping carts at Target.

I was getting desperate when I got a call from Mike Stewart, an old friend and bar owner. They were looking for a manager at Beauty Bar on 14th Street. Was I interested?

I had extensive experience in the internal workings of bars . . . and had even worked at a few. I'd been fired from every bar job in the same way—a meeting with the bosses in which I was informed that there were no bad feelings on their end, and in fact everyone really liked me, but then there was always the same gesture, a shrug with the arms out: What do you want me to do? I understood. My role was to echo the gesture—What do you want
me
to do?—then put the keys on the desk and go out and get truly bombed.

But I was a new man, a guy who didn't drink and didn't sleep around and even did the occasional push-up or walked around the park. I knew, too, that if I were to drink, it would be catastrophic, not just a beer at the end of the shift with the Sunday hardcore matinee veteran doorman. How I longed for one drink. Only one drink, any drink, even something banal and milquetoast, like a vodka cranberry. Sure, just one magical, simple concoction of vodka, juice, ice, and lime to the brim of a cold highball wider than the Pacific Ocean, deeper than the Mariana Trench. Soon I'd be limping through my shifts, having been up till noon the night before, sweating bug spray and trying not to shit my pants, too woozy to stand, obsessively checking the clock until I allowed myself my first drink, and then struggling not to get blitzed until after the money had been counted.

And the temptation while working at a bar . . . wow. Bottle after bottle of top-shelf liquor, the shit I only drank when someone else was buying, Belvedere and Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire, Glenlivet, Patrón. Working in a bar, alcohol is part of your salary: a gratis nightly sousing is your employee meal. I had rage-drunk my way through more than one $50 bottle on a slow night, then stumbled home, feeling like I'd been paid well. Sure, I had walked out with $19 after tipping out the barback, but I must have drank up at least $150 worth of profits! Even the mid-level scotches, Dewar's and J&B, smelled enchanting. J&B was my mom's drink—old lady scotch. I drank an entire bottle of J&B alone one night, bringing that green glass to my lips and tilting my head back, the scotch careening down my throat like golden fire.

I wouldn't just lose the job if I drank, I would lose Mike as a friend. Having alienated all family, except for my mom, and every girl I'd dated (and a few that I hadn't), my few friends were all I had. Taking the job wasn't just a bad idea. It was the worst idea possible, a Rachael Ray–worthy recipe for disaster, apocalyptic and catastrophic and ready in thirty minutes or less.

I took the job.

The training I received was basically “Wear a blazer and keep an eye on what's going on.” I hadn't worked in bars, at odd jobs, and on construction sites for twenty years just so I could go out and buy a blazer
now
, and to work in a bar, no less. I wore plain black T-shirts, which I felt was enough of a concession. I placated stumbling, slurring girls, irate because the doorman had maligned their honor by presupposing they were too drunk to come in, and dudes baffled that their assemblage of flip-flops, khakis, wife beater, backward baseball hat, gold tusk medallion, and liberal dousing of Axe Body Spray didn't meet our dress code. I chased off the creeps, pin-balling hopelessly from girl to girl to girl, their desperation growing. I even pitched in behind the bar when it was busy. That was incredibly bizarre, the foam from an overfilled pint of Blue Moon sliding tantalizingly over the back of my hand like the touch of a dead lover, my nose, eyes, hands, and brain full of Corona, red wine, Jameson, vodka, vodka, VODKA, everything I wasn't allowed to have. I held fast.

The only thing I had trouble with, aside from the blazer, was keeping an eye on what was going on. When the bar was busy, sure, I watched for drunks and pervs and Europeans and didn't do a bad job. But when the bar had only a few people in it, well, I talked guitars with the doorman, read the paper, basically did anything except watch the bar.

I kept my appointments with my addiction counselor, but they were a joke, worse than a waste of time. I was nodding out on morphine at my first appointment (I'd quit drinking but not pills, as the thought of quitting everything was too hard to bear). My counselor hadn't noticed. He talked to me like I was a child or a parolee or some kind of savant. I left the mandatory group therapy sessions wanting to drink more than I had when I walked in.

I grimly pissed in a cup, feeling like a criminal. When my counselor didn't bust me for the drugs that must have shown up, I felt like a cash cow. Project Link was supposed to be my lifeline. Now it made me picture a rusty chain yoking my ankle to a cold iron ball.

I had agreed to go to a counselor in good faith, intending to engage fully. The fastest way through darkness was right through the middle of it. I had actually looked forward to talking about some of the shit I never talked about, perhaps even yelling and screaming and crying. At last, catharsis! But this wasn't
Good Will Hunting
. Therapy was like high school: just keep your head down, complete the work with the least effort possible, fulfill their low expectations of you to perfection, then get the hell out of there. It was a colossal disappointment. But everything else in my life had turned out to be a colossal disappointment, so why had I thought therapy would be any different? I lacerated myself for being naive enough to hope for relief of any kind. I walked around that summer like a tightly coiled spring, just waiting for the slightest thing to set me off: Push me. Please, just push me once. Give me one good excuse to destroy you.