I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (4 page)

My dad found a couple of lukewarm beers in Chuong's room. When he tried to take them, Chuong pushed him or maybe took a halfhearted swing at him. It was a big deal.

That night, there was a serious discussion on the back deck. My father hectored Chuong. My mother defended him. Tatyana, Tashina, and I were even asked to weigh in. I was annoyed at Chuong, but only because he'd outgrown me and because we now had to sit through this whole ordeal.

Everyone took a turn speaking except the accused. He kept his head down, never looked up, only spoke when addressed directly, and then just uttered a barely audible yes or no. Finally, my father called him out.

“Okay, okay, enough. Everyone has spoken here except the one person we really need to hear from. Chuong, what have you got to say for yourself?”

There was a long, pained silence. Chuong sniffed. More silence.

“Chuong?” my dad said.

“Don even wanna live here anymore!” Chuong blurted out, then jumped up and ran off.

He didn't come back that night. Or the next. Or the next.

Finally, Chuong called my mom one day while I was at school. He had taken a bus back to Albuquerque, as my mom had guessed he would. He called her the day he arrived, as my mom had guessed he would. He wanted to tell her that he was safe, that it had been a very long ride, and “I'm sorry, Mom.” He asked her to hang on to his Vietnamese-English dictionary, that he would get it from her one day.

I didn't say anything to anyone at school. But each day, when I came home from class and went out to the chopping block to split and stack the wood for the woodstove for the winter, I cried.

Chuong called me once. He wanted me to sell his leather jacket and send him the money, along with some stuff he'd left behind. I did. One letter came for me, dated September 29, 1990, in Chuong's careful, almost feminine hand: “If you guys don't understand, some day I'll call you guys, ok? I don't know what to say, well, I'm miss you guys very much. Love, Chuong.”

We never heard from him again.

That fall was a wasteland. I felt like someone had reached inside me with a pair of vise-grips and torn something out. The hole was too ragged to heal, just kept bleeding and bleeding. I was lost without Chuong. I hated him. I was sick with worry for him. And I was angry as hell.

We'd been had. My mother had made New Hampshire seem exciting, exotic even. We'd leave the cold wars—between my mother and father, between Tatyana and me—behind. New Hampshire would be a fresh start, not just for me but for our entire family.

It was a sham. We'd found a filthy, impoverished dump where everyone acted like they were better than us. We were as shitty to each other as we'd ever been, or worse. Now my only friend, the brother I'd never had, had been driven off. New Mexico had been hell for me, and I had been eager to escape, but New Hampshire was just a fresh hell.

Everyone had lied to me—my mother, my father, my teachers. Life wasn't some grand adventure, as my mother would have us believe. It was just fleeing from one shithole to the next, each one worse than the last.

After hounding him about it all summer, Lon let me drink with him in the fall of my freshman year. He bought a couple of six-packs of Budweiser tall boys, and we lit a fire out by the railroad tracks with some of his friends. That first sixteen-ounce can felt heavy in my hand and, by extension, dangerous, like a brick or a gun. I had sipped from my dad's beer occasionally, but having my own felt wild, exhilarating. Putting the frosty can to my lips, I drank as long and as fast as I could, relishing the grown-up, unsweet taste, the coolness pooling in my belly. Then I was laughing and stumbling, wrestling with Lon, peeing in the bushes, falling in the bushes, lying down next to the fire. This was hilarious, he was hilarious, everything was hilarious.

When I awoke the next morning, I laid in my bed for a moment. I knew from reading what hangovers were, but I didn't have a hangover at all. I felt great, better than great.

What a night I'd had! Some older girl—a junior!—had put me in her car and driven me around. We had been smoking cigarettes together and listening to the radio. When I had hung my head out the window to barf, there had been two moons! Then we had been lying down together for some indeterminate time, and I had felt her up, or we had kissed or maybe just hugged? The police had been called. The police had been out looking for me!

Alcohol was miraculous. Like in
Harold and the Purple Crayon
, I had drawn an escape hatch in a wall and plunged into another world. Drunk, I'd finally felt comfortable in my own skin. I'd had wild adventures. For a minute, I had been cool. Then I had woken up in bed as if transported by faerie magic. This was an earth-shattering discovery.

As a child, I had pinwheeled through various imagined futures: I would be a knife thrower, I would be an undersea explorer like Jacques Cousteau, I would wail on guitar like Slash. Now I had found it. My father was a nuclear physicist. My mother was a mom.
Alcohol
was what I was supposed to be. I would do this again as soon as possible. I would do this all the time!

After Lon got a solid chewing out from my mother, my main connections for alcohol were Bernie, a homeless schizophrenic Vietnam vet who occasionally tried to grope me, and Pinhead, an ex-Marine who had been kicked out of the military. He had a tattoo on his stomach of a flying penis and testicles ejaculating a winged drop of semen with a single blue eyeball.

I pounded a liter of white zinfandel and fell down a flight of stairs. I chugged a magnum of champagne, swallowing the cigarette butt someone had tossed into it. I got drunk on vodka and came home covered head-to-toe in poison ivy. I climbed one of our neighbor's apple trees with a bottle of Sambuca and drank until I fell out. I lost my virginity later that year on the floor of Lon's bedroom with four other people passed out around us. I remember the dark fake wood paneling and the orange shag rug and not much else.

By the time I was fourteen, my mother had given up trying to control me. She tried to ground me, but what could she do—stop me as I was walking out the door? I was over six feet tall and strong, powerful as I was naive, juvenile and hardheaded, abrasive and arrogant. My dad was rarely around, traveling constantly for business. I
got in daily screaming matches with my mom and Tatyana and got shitfaced at every opportunity.

I breezed through my classes with minimal effort, squeaking by at just above C level. I had finally learned to fight back when picked on and had been suspended from school for fighting so often that I faced expulsion for my next offense. My hairy legs sprawled out from under my desk into the aisles, my gangly arms hung over the front. Once, I stood up, and the desk-and-chair came with me. I almost made it out the door wearing it before the study hall teacher stopped me.

High school's arbitrary social codes were as meaningless as they were constricting. Champion sweatshirts, button-down shirts, and lettermen jackets? I felt like I had walked into an
Archie
comic book. Why the hell must you roll the cuffs of your jeans? I wore the same clothes two or three days in a row, sleeping in them so I could sleep later. My classmates' dreams were hollow, their concerns pointless. The girl I liked wanted to be a dental hygienist! It was all beneath contempt. I had two friends, a couple of guys in my grade who shared my passion for alcohol and my distaste for everything else, and that was enough for me. I carefully set about mocking, offending, and alienating everyone else.

There was nothing I couldn't overpower or outsmart, no game I couldn't cheat or manipulate, no system I couldn't beat. Childhood was claustrophobic and demeaning, a truncated, dependent existence. I was so done with all this. I had nothing else to learn from my parents. I was ready to go out into the world. Okay, I had to learn how to drive, but that was it.

In the beginning of my sophomore year, my two friends suddenly stopped talking to me. A week later, our house was vandalized: “GET OUT COMMIE” and a huge swastika in fluorescent orange spray paint. It was as baffling as it was hurtful. We were not Jewish, or Russian, or communist, or socialist. Was it a response to the immigrant last name I hated so much, the token remnant of my father's Ukrainian heritage?

Surprise, surprise, the vandals were my ex–best friends. What had I done to alienate my only allies? I never found out. I wanted them dead. My mother declined to press charges.

Overnight, I went from cocksure to persecuted. Before, we had been outnumbered. Now I was alone. My mom tried to throw me a surprise birthday party at the Kingston House of Pizza a couple of months later, in the depths of winter. Two large pizzas, one cheese and one pepperoni. We waited there for an hour together before packing them up and bringing them home.

A bulk mailing came one day, addressed to me. I turned it over. “Attend college early!” it said. I tore open the slim pamphlet and read with mounting interest. Simon's Rock College was an accredited university in Massachusetts that accepted students after just two years of high school. Their specific focus was teaching a college curriculum to “bright, motivated adolescents.” “Bright” was a word often tossed my way. “Motivated” wasn't. But if escaping both high school and my parents two years early couldn't motivate me, nothing could. I walked into the house and said, “Hey, Mom, can I borrow twenty-three thousand dollars?”

My parents talked it over when my dad got home from his latest business trip. There was no way they'd be able to afford it in the same year they were footing the bill for Tatyana's out-of-state tuition to the University of Colorado . . . but what was the harm in getting a little more information?

It was decided that I would be allowed to send away for an application. My mom made it clear that the B-minuses I had been pulling down in everything except weight training wouldn't impress anyone. Overnight, I dug in at school.

The application required what amounted to extra homework. Such bullshit! But the faraway school seemed to shimmer with possibility. Simon's Rock didn't just promise escape. It made me reconsider all the lectures I'd gotten about the potential I was wasting.