What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (15 page)

I stole her pills. I thought they might help me relax, which they did. They gave me a numbness that stopped the feeling I had when I paced the halls listening to loud music. It was a feeling like I wanted to smash windows and run screaming down the highway. With the pills I could sleep and I lost my appetite, which was good, because no one ever cooked.

I didn’t go back to school in the fall. I couldn’t get it together. The others got a new house near the old one. I went over a couple times at the beginning of the semester. There were friends I didn’t know, girls. I thought people were looking at me funny, like they thought I’d gone crazy. It was probably nonsense. We’d had a lot of friends on hiatus from school before. I don’t know why I thought I was special.

I’m not going to get sentimental and say it was “the summer that changed my life” or anything like that. It wasn’t. I’ve had worse summers since, and certainly more fucked-up ones. The next summer I was in McLean Hospital. I could tell a story about that, about all the crazy people I met there.

After rehab I went back on pills then back in rehab then drinking then sober. I’ve had jobs since then that I’ve quit and ones I’ve been fired from. I have a job now like the ones my neighbors had when I watched them sweat in their cars, and when I look at myself in the mirror it’s with the same hate they looked at me with then.

I’ve had relationships too, good and bad. I was married for a while. It didn’t work out.

My brother got married too. I was the best man but got drunk and punched a waiter in the face for reasons I still don’t understand but were supposedly related to a shortage of franks-’n’-blankets.

I watched his marriage dissolve more quickly than my own, though I don’t know why it did, because I know Derek was capable of so much love, far more than me, and I was jealous of that and then sad because it didn’t matter in the end.

Our mother died at sixty-five of cancer. At the funeral Derek and I stood over her stone, and as the rabbi was talking Derek said, “She’s happier down there,” and instead of feeling trite it felt true.

I saw Jeff Porch one more time. It was the end of fall and the wind was blowing in New England fashion, which is a euphemism for unbearable. I’d been at school signing the necessary papers for my semester off. I was walking back to the T and trying to light a cigarette but failing because of the wind. Not giving up, I stood there repeatedly flicking the lighter until my finger burned with cold and friction. Someone came up behind me.

“Twat’s up?” Jeff said.

I gave up on the cigarette, put the lighter away.

“I’m heading home,” I said. “What are you up to these days?”

“Going to California,” Jeff said, “San Diego, California.”

“Sounds warmer than here,” I said.

“I heard at the zoo there they have a two-headed snake,” Jeff said. Right then I knew that he would make it to California and that I never would.

Milligrams

1. SUMMER

June and there’s no A/C. The lobster we named Ralph crawls across Sasha’s stomach. He has rubber bands on his claws. Sasha watches the ceiling fan revolve. Ralph nibbles at her belly button, runs a claw across her pubic hair. Sasha widens her legs. I take Ralph’s claw, guide it over her clit. Ralph doesn’t resist.

Sasha lifts her neck and stares at my face. I know she likes my full lips and my once-broken nose; they remind her of her father, she’s mentioned, the one who almost touched her nipple but didn’t, just moved his finger around it, which doesn’t count as incest Sasha says.

Now Sasha’s father pays the half of the rent that Andy’s father stopped paying. He also pays for other stuff like lobsters and imported olive oil. If it
had
been incest, maybe he’d pay the whole rent, but I don’t mention this to Sasha. She’s still Daddy’s girl, and one day soon I’m sure she’ll call him and be gone from here, whisked away to Arizona or Malibu, to kind nurses and soft beds, softer than ours, which creaks and moans when we push against the springs, waking the neighbors and making us feel like rusty machinery, as if the sounds are being issued from our own bodies.

2. SNEAKERS

Sasha bought running shoes a couple months back. She’s never worn them, but I think it’s a sign. I imagine her in the white Nikes, heading west on the Pike. In this daydream Sasha’s legs are prostheses, the bionic kind given to the young vets I see on TV. The legs move of their own accord. Sasha’s eyes are closed and she doesn’t know she’s running.

3. SUMMER

Sasha grabs Ralph by the claws. She lifts him into the air, holds him over us like a baby. I pinch her nipple, feel it harden between my fingers. Her ribs rise and fall beneath the weight of my hand. Sasha looks up at Ralph’s underside. He is squirming. She brings him down and places him between us on the bed.

“Are we gonna eat him later?” I say.

“I feel bad,” she says.

“Do we have butter?”

“He gives such good head.”

She one-beat stutter-laughs and then looks sad, as if to say, “Ain’t it funny, ain’t it true, we all give head and then fall into boiling water.” If we took off Ralph’s rubber bands he’d pinch the shit out of us.

“Whatever,” I say, and roll onto my stomach. I can feel Sasha sit up, and I know she’s on the edge of the bed, leaning over the coffee table. I hear the crush and chop of her father’s gold card. The ceiling fan whirs, but it’s a quiet whir.

“We’re out,” Sasha says.

“Out of what?”

“It,” she says, because she knows I don’t say Oxy now that Andy’s dead, I just say “it.”

“Save me some,” I say.

“We’re out,” she says.

4. LAST WINTER

The coffee shop was only selling coffee. No more sandwiches. No more croissants. No more dark-suited business types ordering extra foam. The only ones left were the junkies who stood out front jingling change and bumming cigarettes. They had nicknames, or no names, and part of me wanted to join their anonymous parade that marched the city at night, through the Chinatown gates, in and out of squats in the old Combat Zone, up Tremont to the North End, and out to the harbor.

Sasha wasn’t one of them. You could tell from her haircut. Angles too precise, texture too full-bodied. She was from Connecticut—the good part.

5. CALIFORNIA

Ralph’s in a pot of boiling water and the apartment smells like the ocean, which I haven’t seen since my parents loved me, when they spent big bucks and sent me to Malibu Horizon to become a different person, the kind who goes to college and brings home girlfriends for Thanksgiving.

When I say my parents loved me, I’m pretty sure I mean it. Money is the truest form of love. If I had money I’d buy eighty milligrams. My parents think that’s the opposite of love—self-hate, they used to say, self-destruction. How to explain that for some of us love comes out of our bodies, and for others it’s something we have to put in?

Malibu Horizon cost them a chunk, and they never forgave me when I came back East and back to the way I was before. I wasn’t ready to be an adult, an ex, a former. I’m not sure I am now, but I think about it some nights when Sasha’s sweat feels like glue and I can hear the machine lifting the dumpster outside McDonald’s and dropping it.

6. DINNER

Sasha stands at the counter chopping parsley and pretending that we’re real people. She’s wearing jeans and she doesn’t have a butt anymore, or never did. Her half-blond hair is long and tangled. It covers her back like a dirty poncho.

Ralph is dead. I got a stick of butter from the store. I bought white wine too. It’s not what I want, and the lobster’s not either. I want to call Mike and have him come over, but Sasha doesn’t get money until the first, and the first isn’t until Monday. Mike doesn’t take credit cards. Sasha’s father put a cap on cash-back from her Amex. In the meantime we have Ralph and the rest of my paycheck, which can’t get eighty milligrams, not even forty. There were no dollars in the tip jar, just nickels, dimes, and a Canadian quarter.

“Do we have any weed?” I say.

“Maybe,” Sasha says, and then repeats a line from the radio, which plays songs she thinks are old because she was born in ’86, but that I remember from high school—“
Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam
.”

“Where would it be if we had some?” I say.

“I think I finished it when you were at work,” she says.

“Maybe J. Smooth has something,” I say.

“He doesn’t,” she says. “I saw him yesterday. He doesn’t.”

“Maybe he got some since then.”

“Call him,” she says.

Ralph’s done. The parsley butter’s in a coffee mug that says Busch Gardens. It must have been Andy’s. I take Ralph’s steaming body, crack it open with my hands, lick his juice from my fingers. “I wish we had those small forks,” Sasha says.

In bed, post-Ralph, Sasha tries to get me hard with her hand. It’s not working. Her hands are dry and she’s pulling too forcefully. I encircle her wrist with my thumb and forefinger, pull her hand away. I can’t sleep. Sasha moans while she gets herself off. Her breath is grasping, as if she’s trying to recall a song heard in a dream; the words are on the tip of her tongue.

7. HOW WE MET

I’d been watching her for days: her straw-fiddling, her chapped-lip-cracked blood-dripping. She read a book and sometimes the sections of day-old newspaper that lay scattered across the tables. I liked the idea of the newspaper, thought of myself as the type of person who would read a newspaper.

Outside she bummed a cigarette.

“Hey,” she said. I nodded, leaned back against the brick wall. It was like a movie. A bad movie that you watch because you want your life to be like it. Sasha didn’t look like the girl in the movie. Her teeth were too big and her hair wasn’t blond enough. She stared across the street at a cute kid walking his dog.

“I hate kids,” she said.

“Fuck ’em,” I said. It was lucky I didn’t have a kid. It was lucky I had a bed and it was nearby. It was lucky Andy was dead. Not for him, but for the purposes of my sex life. His dad still paid half the rent.

8. GUESTS

I wake up to someone banging on the door. My logic: it’s got to be J. Smooth; he must have drugs. I put on jeans and don’t bother to button them.

Two guys. One is Alex Sammerstein, Andy’s brother. The other is Dennis Gundy from the grade above me.

“Come in,” I say. I lead them to the plaid street-couch that has holes and what I sometimes call “character” when Sasha complains, waves her gold card.

Dennis and Alex don’t sit. Dennis leans against the wall and raps it with his knuckle. Alex pans the apartment, assessing the ripped
Big Lebowski
poster; the single photo of our old dog Papi held to the fridge by a magnet that says “fortuitous,” a leftover from a disappeared set of poetry magnets; Ralph’s crushed shell, which lies in the sink.

“Long time,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Whatup.”

“Whatup,” Dennis says.

9. THEN

Dennis was scrawny, with a ponytail and sideburns. He wore tie-dye and never got laid, one of those guys whose friends are slightly better-looking and more confident. He probably wrote poems, threw them away.

Alex once lay down in the middle of his street and told me he wanted to be flattened by his mother’s SUV, for her to back out and see his broken body, see the bones she grew in her womb destroyed under the weight of her car. He had the same look you see in sci-fi movies when an alien is using someone’s body as a shell. Andy and I had to drag him back into the garage.

10. NOW

Dennis has cleaned up—his shoulders are broad, his hair hangs just above his ears, his sideburns are trimmed, his clothes are mixed prep with a touch of hip-kid slim—and he probably went to college, has a job, and is self-sufficient with slight parental assistance. His posture has improved, though he still stands with outward-facing feet.

Alex, I know, is at Suffolk Law and doesn’t smoke pot anymore, which is weird because he gave me my first joint, first hit of acid, first pill of E, and first hand job—which he didn’t actually give me himself, but convinced Sheryl Yung to give me because she was drunk and I was an adorable freshman. I’m sure he hates me now, holds me responsible. It wasn’t my fault, though; Andy wanted to die high, said it constantly. Alex never came by. He never peeked in and said Andy’s name in the firm tone of tough love.

“You still have Andy’s shit?” Alex says.

“What shit?” I say.

“His shit,” Alex says.

I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter because Sasha walks out of our room in a white terry-cloth bathrobe she stole from a hotel we rented on Virginia Beach in January with her dad’s card. We’d holed up in it for days looking at the beach from our window. This was shortly after Andy died, when Sasha and I were new and sick of winter.

Alex and Dennis look at her. She’s not so beautiful. And now she’s bony with dirty hair. But still, something in her gaze must penetrate. Her chapped lips squirm into a half-smile that is both disconcerting and dick-suck-offering.

“We have guests,” she says to no one in particular.

“This is Sasha,” I say.

“Yo,” Dennis says, and then blushes because he’s still shy around girls even now that he’s in skinny jeans.

Alex is staring at the photo of Papi on the fridge and figuring out that he’s dead. The apartment doesn’t smell like dog, hasn’t for a long time. It was Andy’s fault, not mine. Or it was both our fault. We wanted to be dog people.

“Where’s the dog?” he says.

“Heaven,” I say.

“Who are you guys?” Sasha says. She’s standing on one leg in a yoga position that she sometimes stands in when she wants to emanate calm. Her right leg is bent and tucked against the inner thigh of her left. You can see her bare leg almost up to her crotch, where a swath of robe hangs loosely. Her hands are held in prayer position in front of her chest. Dennis looks at her, then looks away.

“Alex is Andy’s brother,” I say. I wonder why she looks so calm, if it’s because she’s hoarding and hiding, getting high in the bathroom when I’m not around. She’s not fidgeting and tongue-biting like me.

“Oh,” she says, and puts her leg down.

11. ANDY

We don’t talk about Andy. I met her a month after he died. His door stays shut, though I see it when I pass to the kitchen or the bathroom, and I know Sasha does too. Once Sasha said we should turn that room into something, a guest room, and I said yeah, one of these days.

“Where’s all his stuff?” Alex says.

“Like what?” I say. “I don’t know what’s his.”

“DVDs,” he says. “DVD player. Laptop. Bike.”

“He didn’t have a bike,” I say.

“He had a bike,” Alex says.

“He didn’t have it here,” I say, though now I remember the bike, an orange bike that stayed in the closet for months until Andy sold it.

“Whatever’s his is in his room,” I say.

12. ANDY’S ROOM

There are large clumps of lint in the corners and stuck to the pillow, but other than that it still looks like someone lives here. His cell phone’s plugged in and it says “charge complete.” The sheet is half off the mattress, and you can see where someone drew a heart onto the foam and wrote “MB+LS 4 Eva.”

Alex kneels and picks up a DVD—no case, just the disc. The DVD is mine, and I’d forgotten I owned it.

“Andy loved this movie,” Alex says, and I say yeah and sit on the mattress, which isn’t where I found Andy.

Dennis picks up a stack of CDs from the desk and puts them in a backpack. He doesn’t look at them. Alex opens the closet and runs his finger across some hanging shirts. “There’s not much here,” he says.

Sasha stands in the hallway watching. She has her cell phone open but she’s not talking. Alex lifts the TV and takes the DVD player out from under it.

“You don’t want the TV?” I say.

“It’s old,” he says.

“I didn’t sell it,” I say.

Sasha has shut her cell phone and edged into the doorway, which she now blocks. Alex picks up a crumpled T-shirt from the floor, neatly folds it, then puts it back on the floor.

Dennis opens the drawers. There are a couple pipes, little glass ones. Dennis puts them in his pocket. He pulls out a bag of pot stems and places it on top of the bureau next to a pile of unopened junk mail and Andy’s keys, which still have on their ring a rape whistle they gave out to girls in high school. Alex picks up a handful of pink Styrofoam balls from the floor and flicks them from his palm. Dennis pulls a prescription container out of another drawer and shakes it. There’s no sound, and he places it next to the other items on top of the bureau.

“Where’s his iPod?” Alex says.

13. THE BATHROOM

Alex grunts. “I’m a take a piss,” he says. He’ll see the wet magazines, the empty baggies and prescription bottles, the black mold, the red mold, the stray hairs, the beer cans, the loose pennies, the underwear, the T-shirts, the plastic bag filled with used tampons, the bits of dried mucus stuck to the sink bowl, the dried shit on the inside of the toilet bowl, the bloodstain on the tiles next to the toilet.