Two Medicine (4 page)

“
I
knew
this was coming,” I said. “Something told me … something about
her changed at some point.”

Scott was nodding
slightly. He seemed to be listening still, which was a good sign,
not too drunk. I tried to keep talking but then I gave up and just
frowned down into my beer. The drinks came from Steve and he
plopped down bowl of unshelled peanuts between us.

Scott picked one up and
crushed it in his fist.

“
Well?”
he asked, “what are you going to
do
about it?”

I pictured the way Holly
always bounced up and down and smiled at me happily when I came to
her door after driving to see her – it was my favorite image of
her. She was always such a fresh charge of joy for me, like
refilling my cup when I was dead thirsty, each and every time. I
felt myself tearing up all of a sudden – there in that ridiculous
bar at 12:30 pm on a Monday.

Scott and I were not the
type of guys to cry and carry on in front of each other, even as
close as we were, so I fought back the tears and took a big gulp of
the beer.

I swirled the beer slowly
in my glass. “She just up and said that we were done, so sudden,
not a half hour ago, man… broke my heart…” I trailed
off.

Guys talking about
emotions with each other is usually done only with slight hints,
embarrassed and sarcastic wisecracks, indirect suggestions, rarely
the pouring out of your heart that many women do so well. It’s
always this awkward dancing around the real feelings with men,
always a show of cynical bravado amidst the pain. But Scott’s next
question took me by surprise.

“
Will? I been thinkin’” he
swirled the wine in his glass. “What do you want out of this life?”
He said it with such a strange voice, with a quiet, almost
embarrassed conviction that I looked up at him. Conviction was
something rare for him.

“
You hate your fuckin’
job,” he said, holding one finger up, “you hate this town,” a
second finger, “and you hate your life,” third finger. “You’re
gonna hate Holly soon.” Fourth finger.

“
I’ll never hate her,” I
responded.

“
So,” he
said, ignoring me and closing his fingers, dramatically making a
fist and shaking it in front of my face, “what would make you happy
then, in this screwed-up world?
Really
? What would make you happy?”
He put it to me like a challenge.

“
Where’s all this coming
from?” I asked him. “Is this all from that weird motivational
speaker your parents sent you too in Orlando?”

“
Answer
the question, if you can,” he said with a half-smile, shaking his
head, “hell, if you even
know
.”

“
What do
I want?” I asked. “I
don’t
know.”

I paused and thought about
it a moment
.
I
looked back at him, a strange conviction fighting to surpass the
pain and loss in my heart. It was difficult to put into words what
that arising feeling exactly was (difficult for a guy to say it at
least) but I did my best.

“
I… I want to get what I
want!” I stammered, glancing around the completely empty bar and
nonetheless lowering my voice. “And I want the girl of my dreams
waiting at home for me, in a big house, and I want that house to be
in a place that I like, where I’m happy, that’s what I
want...”

Scott looked down with a
smirk on his face and grabbed some peanuts, spilling some on the
table. “You need to get more specific than that, buddy,” he said,
“if you want to get anywhere in this life.”

Ironic it was that Scott,
of all people, was trying to be my life coach – my drunken,
usually-unemployed, erratic motivational speaker who veered back
and forth between the six-figure jobs and the bar stool. But then
again he had already lived twice of my lifetimes. But then again he
had me meet him at Coco Joe’s without a shred of
embarrassment.

But he was sincere about
what he had just said, I could tell that much. He spoke in sarcasm
perpetually, but behind it I knew he was as invested in my being
happy as I was – he
needed
my life to be working out, as the only life raft
for him to hold onto.

I took a big sip of my
beer and sat forward, looking at him, trying to find the words to
spell out some kind of a feeling that was I had been carrying
around inside me all morning. My face felt hot and my throat hurt
as I swallowed down more feelings.

“
There
has
to be more than this for me, for us,” I said. “Don’t you
think, Scott?”

He shook his head,
“No.”

But I pressed on. “I just
want to be someplace where I feel like… like I’m not missing out on
something, you know? I fucking feel like I’m missing out on
everything
now, man, and
I want to be in a place where that feeling stops.”

“
And it’s not here,” Scott
said, pointing a finger down on the table we were at, and then
draining his wine. He looked back at me. “Everyone feels like that
you know.”

“
Not like this,” I said,
my voice constricted. Regret filled my heart as I thought of all I
had said.

It was pretty much what
most people felt, Scott was right, but to the same
degree
that I was feeling
right now? Was the whole world so sick and disappointed, so
angry?

“
You’re just stuck in the
moment, overreacting,” Scott said.

No. Holly saying what she
had said just woke up what was already slumbering inside me, and
she woke it up with a vengeance. I thought, as I sat there in Coco
Joe’s, of other girls I had loved before Holly that hadn’t worked
out. I thought of other things I had tried so hard to get or to
accomplish over the years: music, sports… a kind of…
specialness.

I thought of loss and
disappointment, of past faces and images, and goals, of bitter
memories and embarrassing things. I was quickly spiraling into a
worsening depression, sitting at that table at Coco Joe’s, and I
was supposed to be the life raft! Who could
I
hang on to now that a storm had
truly come for
me
?
Didn’t
I
need a
life raft?

From out of the storm
clouds Scott said, “So what you want is Montana.”

He smiled at
me as he said that, with a slight sarcasm in his
voice, but this “Montana” thing was an old joke between us. The
joke existed because I had announced, more often than not in
desperation and more than once to him over many years that I was
“moving to Montana.”

I really had in fact
always been obsessed with Montana since I was young and had
travelled through parts of the state on Boy Scout trip. After
seeing my camping trip slide show pictures after returning, I was
hooked and was thereafter obsessed with what I imagined to be the
visceral struggle and the harsh majesty of living up there year
round – Eden-like summers, hellish winters in the harsh and
beautiful Rockies.

Montana had fascinated me
ever since that boyhood trip, living in the mountains, living wild
and free; and it had become of kind religious mantra of mine when
things got bad – that I would soon be “moving to Montana;” a kind
of “screw this place!” statement. It was funny also because it was
so damn far from Georgia.

My worship and cult-life
reverence for Montana was further engrained in me when I was in
college and saw the movie
Legends of the
Fall,
with Brad Pitt. After watching that I
had decided right there, in the theatre, that I was going to live
in the remote and majestic mountains in Montana and start up a
ranch, somehow, someway, or at least get some kind of job up there.
I had even looked at jobs there my senior year, teaching English
Lit in high school, and had even applied to work on a ranch. I
spent time studying maps that semester, working out where the best
land was to buy, and what the state law required in terms of ranch
operation and land management. But the grind of reality and
distractions of the present had slowing caused that feverish
obsession to fade – not slowly, actually, it had quickly faded that
senior year like a candle in a jar puffing out into smoke – faded
into a joke.

The practicalities of life
had slowly extinguished the ember of that childhood dream in the
ensuing years, and my obsession had been whittled away to a mere
nostalgic regret, to a mere joke to be uttered in a dive bar in
Atlanta on a Monday afternoon.

“
I don’t know,” I said
with a frown. “I’m just sick of it all, sick of wasting my
time.”

Even as I said this, I knew
it sounded whiney, self-pitying, but I couldn’t now stop once I had
gotten started, not after this morning, not after Holly’s scare,
not after this grind in which I felt trapped. These feelings were
actually growing more intense within me as each second passed as I
sat with Scott. I didn’t care if I sounded “woe is me.” I
had
never
felt
this level of dismay before, dismay bordering on a rage, and it was
starting to scare me.

I raised a finger back at
Scott now. “There was my making it in music,” I raised a second,
“my publishing a novel…”

Scott took a gulp of wine,
not looking at me, as I continued.

“
My working on a ranch in
Montana,” third finger, “my marrying a beautiful girl,” a fourth
finger slowly raised.

“
God ENOUGH!” Scott
suddenly slammed his hand on the table loudly, nearly knocking it
over as the glasses shook and spilled over. Steve looked up quickly
from the bar, frowning again.

“
Fuck
all that!” Scott said angrily, his speech slurring slightly. “Fuck
this defeatist bullshit, man. That’s not
you
Will. You aren’t that type of
person. Go out and fucking get it – if you want it. If you got the
balls.”

He looked closely at me,
as if seeing something strange in my eyes. “Where’s the guy that
put off college to tour in a band, against his asshole father’s
express orders not to, who ended up playing on stage with R.E.M.?”
he asked. “Where’s the guy that fucked his college Shakespeare
professor even though she was married and her husband is a
well-known cop?” He looked around the bar theatrically as if
looking for “that guy.”

Both of those stories
about me were true, and Scott was always mentioning them when I got
down, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel any better as he
catalogued them. But then Scott looked back at me and grew serious,
leaning towards me.

“
And where’s the guy who
talked me off the ledge that day, missing his college graduation
ceremony to do it?”

I
did
feel something as he said that;
that story was the darkest time in Scott’s dark life. He was going
to kill himself, the only time I had seen him try it. He had taken
an entire bottle of Paxil and drank a half a liter of Vodka by the
time I found him. H had sent me a bitter and heart-wrenching
farewell via text, which I got right before the start of my college
graduation ceremony, with my father in the audience, gowns and hats
on and everything.

It was so disturbing that
I got up from my row immediately, stepping past all my seated
classmates, and I called 911 as I ran to my car and drove off to
where he was. The next thing I knew I was on his bathroom floor, my
graduation gown still on, tears in my eyes, making him puke with my
finger down his throat as he lay on my lap, half dead, yelling at
him to wake up.

He was put in a psych ward
for two weeks after that. They made him wear pajamas and told him
when he had to go to sleep at night. Just thinking of him there
still jarred me.

I did not like to think of
that day at all and Scott never mentioned it either, until that day
in the bar, when I had pretty much lost my way. He brought up that
terrible moment, his darkest, most embarrassing moment, the moment
he looked the most foolish, desperate and crazy. And he brought it
up to shock me back into life. I loved him for things like that. He
did stuff like that sometimes.

I didn’t know what to say
after he said that, so I said nothing and just looked back at
him.

He continued. “Will, you
don’t need to stay here if you don’t want to.” He meant Atlanta.
“You can do anything you want. There is a huge world out there, and
you have what it takes to make it anywhere.”

“
And you
know what?” He leaned forward again, holding my attention. “You
are
lucky
.”

“
How so?” I
asked.

“
You
haven’t ever made any
real
mistakes, not yet, not like me,” he said. “I had
everything before, as you know, and I lost it all. I’ll have it all
again I know, but I’ll probably piss all that away too again. You,
however, went from childhood to school, from school to work, and
from work to home, without really fucking anything up. You’re
untainted, man. You can do anything you want.”