by Nick Mamatas
“And why,” I asked, “does the sandman always appear as a disturber of love? Freud!” I was so excited I dropped the bottle and it shattered. I don’t remember anything else of that night; I know my memory is at least somewhat accurate as my pants smelled like Teacher’s for a few days after that and every time I stole away to a secret place to disrobe and take the pants leg to my nose, I remembered something else about what I had wanted to tell Alexa.
(7)
I wanted to tell Alexa about the moment I first felt like a normal person, a person inside someone else’s point of view, in the center of things. I had a habit, ever since I was a kid, of saying to myself This moment I’ll remember forever. Naturally, I rarely remembered the actual moments, or what I had been thinking about just before making my little declaration. One time in the dark backseat of my father’s car, full of cigarette smoke coming in from the front, I was in a scratchy blue suit—Easter? Some cousin’s christening? Were we returning from a visit to a great-aunt who only spoke Greek and pinched my cheeks and cut me slices of halva? Another time I remember it being so hot that the acrylic carpeting I was lying on top of, in front of the TV, smelled like it was about to break down into its component chemicals. But dozens of other times, dozens of solemn vows that this or that moment was something I’d remember forever, I forgot most all of them.
I got to Boston only a couple of months after Yvette. The MFA programs had long since made their decisions, so all I could do was sign up for a certificate program at Emerson. I was going to get a Literary Publishing Certificate. Even then I knew it sounded extremely fucking ridiculous, and I laughed every time those three words marched out my mouth, all in a foolish little row. My mother wept for three days, then told me that I couldn’t have any money. My father did slip me five hundred dollars in wrinkly twenties and told me I could call if I needed more.
“For food,” he said, “only for food.” He made jokes about me meeting Mike Dukakis and told me not to drink the water in Boston.
I found a room in Somerville the easy way—scanning copies of the Globe till I found an ad for housing with a Greek surname. Papatheofanis, that suited me. Then I called and said Vasilis Kostopolos properly with no American accent, and dropped the other few Greek words I knew. I wasn’t going to Emerson or to college, but to skolio and would love to see their spiti. It worked. I sold the car for two months’ rent and was otherwise stupid—I thought I’d write a short story a week, just like Ray Bradbury, and sell them for money. More than fifty dollars too, I promised myself. I’ll even write gay porn if I have to, I promised myself. The room didn’t allow a hot plate, but I packed one anyway.
“Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers,” Charles Bukowski once said. He probably said it more than once. I was desperate in Boston, but I wasn’t really a writer. I guess Bukowski’s little aphorism isn’t commutative—desperation doesn’t make the writer. I was desperate for Yvette, and also desperate not to seem desperate. We were in different workshops at school. I would trail her around the city, hoping to be nonchalantly discovered by the right shelf at Commonwealth Books, or just happening to be attending the right film in Kendall Square’s fancy arthouse theater, or in line at the Abbey Lounge. Abbey Lounge, that was the death of me. Yvette had a little page on MySpace, and on it mentioned wanting to go see Lyres—a pretty famous local band that never got anywhere but old. The vocalist/keyboardist was notorious for playing with only one hand. I decided I’d go as well.
Yvette wasn’t talking to me much, really. She wasn’t all that polyamorous either, so far as I could tell. She was seeing a guy named Colin. He was short where I was tall, as fair as I was dark, local and loaded rather than Midwestern and broke like myself. He wore suit jackets with patches on the elbows, like he was seventy years old. His wardrobe had belonged to his grandfather, who had a men’s room at Harvard named after him or somesuch, but Colin still felt oppressed by the specter of white Protestantism that haunted “the Square.” You know that line Gore Vidal supposedly leveled at Dominick Dunne at the sort of party I’d be able to attend only if my uncle Stelyo was catering the thing:
“Why do you suppose Irish Catholics are all such social climbers? Is it because their mothers were all maids? Oh, I don’t mean you.” For Colin, that was all of American society laid bare, its seminal racism on display.
I know all this because Colin turned out to be the nicest guy on the planet. I saw Yvette in the pile outside the Abbey Lounge. To call it a line would be an insult to Euclid. She smiled at me; her brown eyes widened. She looked authentically happy to see me, after several weeks of hugging herself when we spoke, of keeping three feet between us in the halls at Emerson.
“Billy! How great!” Yvette said. “The Lyres are supposed to be awesome.”
Colin materialized next to her with a quick correction. “Lyres, not The Lyres.” And then they kissed, hard. Yvette was the initiator, actually. She threw her arms around his thick neck and pulled herself to him, her tongue out of her mouth before even making contact with his lips. She kissed with her eyes closed, but Colin kept his open. He was looking right at me, suddenly aware that he was a pawn in some asinine game. Yvette’s enthusiasm seemed authentic enough; she broke away from the kiss at the right time. Colin looked like he was about to die of embarrassment. I stood there watching, a giant pervert. Had she gone down on him right on the pavement I wouldn’t have been less entranced. All the little things she did with her kisses with me—the hard squint, the sucking on his tongue in her mouth—she did with him too. Yes, I was watching that closely. All three of us went in, and I headed straight to the bar.
I drank, of course. I’m from Ohio, of course I drank; in the 7-Eleven parking lot, while someone else’s car stereo blasted “Sweet Emotion”; with my folks, slurping down sweet Greek wine my father pressed himself and fermented in big clear carboys; on my twenty-first birthday, thrilled to be legal and ready to try everything in the bar in alphabetical order. Alabama Slammer. Bourbon, neat. Collins, comma Tom. The bartender even snorted at my little joke. But that night at Abbey Lounge, I really drank. Not to forget, but to remember forever that ineffable mix of betrayal and hunger I felt. The bar felt good under my elbows. I slouched like the guys I’d seen muttering to themselves and flexing their fingers around longnecks in the bars of Youngstown. That’s when I decided—I’d be one of those guys, a guy with a wound that could never, ever heal. I drank till I liked the taste of the cheapest beer they had. The band went on, but it was all just high-pitched buzzing to me.
What did I want? Yvette to sidle up next to me, put a hand on my shoulder, lean in close and tell me simply and succinctly what a total loser I was? Then I’d be satisfied. I could saunter up to Colin and have him beat the shit out of me. He looked like one of those slummers who pretended that being Irish in the Boston area still meant something; maybe he took boxing lessons. He could break my nose. I’d wake up stretched across three plastic chairs in an emergency room. Some billionaire resident from Harvard medical school could give my schnozz a nice clean jerk and snap it back into place. I’d be happy again.
But that didn’t happen. The Abbey Lounge was a two-room club—the bar in one, the bandstand in the other. There was a window cut into the drywall, so it was easy enough to see Yvette and Colin bopping their heads along with the music, along with everyone else. It was like an assembly line, and I was the drunk peering in from the other side of the factory gates, wanting in yet knowing I couldn’t ever hack a day job. My hands began to shake. I wanted to smash a beer bottle over my own head, be a riot. I knew I had to say something, to confront Yvette. I took a step forward. My tongue felt hollow.
I woke up in Somerville, on the saggy couch that some Tufts girl had left behind a few weeks prior. It smelled terrible. It always had, but I was sure I’d soiled myself. Now it was my limbs that felt hollow. Then the thing I’d always remember—Colin was sitting on the edge of the milk crate and balsa wood coffee table, looking
concerned. He had moved some of my books onto the floor so he’d have a place to sit.
My mouth opened and an exhalation fell out. This was the first time of so many I’d wake up on my couch, or some couch anyway, not quite sure how I’d gotten home or who helped me out of my clothes, or how long it had been since booze last hit belly, and it sure wouldn’t be the last. You never forget your first, not ever. After a while, you start to crave it. It’s like teleportation—blink your eyes, and you’re home. Or like being a baby again. Someone carries you where you need to be.
“‘A woman should be an illusion,’” I told him.
He looked around, eyes suddenly everywhere. “Henry Miller?” he guessed. I didn’t have the heart or mind to tell him Ian Fleming, so I just pretended I made it up myself.
Colin brought me soup. He cleaned up the room a bit. The bathroom was suddenly spotless. He was the nicest guy in the world, really. For a long moment I even contemplated bisexuality—my own, not his. No wonder Yvette wanted to crawl into his mouth and set up housekeeping by his molars back at the Abbey Lounge. How else could she tell me that it’s over? I wouldn’t have believed that she really did find someone better in every way. So much better that even I couldn’t stay mad at him. I could only stay mad at myself, and I have, forever.
Colin and I actually started hanging out. He never said anything about my drinking, which I guess was fueled by his presence in those early days. I still wanted to punch him, then maybe flip Yvette up on the bar of wherever we were hanging out and wale on her ass with my belt, just like the abusive redneck fathers in half the stories we had to read for our workshops. It was a fashion for a few months, actually. A competition. Each class the fathers in the stories would get drunker and more violent—spankings turned to strappings turned to crude fingering. Finally, in one of the stories where the girl character died, the professor declared the story “genre fiction, horror really,” and the workshop reset itself.
I mostly saw Yvette over Colin’s shoulder when the three of us would go out. Women were always a mystery to me; that was my problem. My problem with her, with myself and the great idea I had to drag myself halfway across the country to live in a bedsit half the size of my room at home, and with the nonsense I tried to write for class. How sad and pathetic I must have looked, tagging along with them all over town, like a foreign cousin already bored with America. They didn’t even bother trying to set me up with any friends. Yvette knew it would be a waste of time, and Colin’s friends would find me utterly inexplicable.
“What do you mean, you don’t go sailing every summer,” they’d say through congenitally clenched teeth. “Surely you do. You’re just being contrary.”
Colin also rolled his eyes when I did that impression. So I was the third wheel, the date-ender. When I passed out, it was time for everyone to go home.
But Yvette wasn’t a mystery anymore. She was just one cute girl in a city full of them, who had a ready smile and enough quirks to make her seem attainable. Every girl likes to think she cleans up well, likes to think she gives a great blowjob. What other kind of feedback are they going to get from the free market of men, anyway? The only reason I thought she was special was because she had once liked me, and I hated me.
Drinking became a problem pretty quickly. Even as I write these words, on some level I am still aware that I have a problem. I keep drinking because there’s no reason to even contemplate stopping anymore. The world is ending because America has ended. My marginal Greek might fly in overcrowded, broiling, desiccated Athens, but I have no way to get there. They say that one can kick alcohol only after it becomes a bigger issue than everything else in one’s life, but that will never ever happen. The times have caught up with me. But the little core of my interest in drinking is just what I said—Yvette used to like me. Colin, for whatever reason, was breathtakingly nice to me. Every day I’d wake up in my dumpy little twin bed in a shoebox-sized room in a town I hated, away from my parents and my few friends, and want to split open my own sternum, dig my fingers into my chest, and yank my black heart from my body and throw it against the wall.
I made it through the semester. It got so cold, so quickly, in Boston. There’s a bite to the city that we don’t get in Ohio. Another reason to stay in a bar till closing time. The walls in my little room were paper-thin. I didn’t love alcohol at first. I could nurse a whisky for hours. But then I started to crave it. The way whisky filled the sinuses. The candy flavor of cheap wines. Martinis that taste so weak on the tongue, but leave the stomach bruised. I was punching myself, and like anything a person does often enough, I got used to it. Got to like it. And writers drank. They didn’t drink as much as tyros and wannabes, but they did drink. I was going to drink myself into torpor, into genius. Colin would often drink with me, even if Yvette was off somewhere else. Once, he asked me about her.
“Why do you care so much?” he said. “This is friggin’ Boston. You can whip out your dick and trawl the streets for women just by being here, young, and able to speak decent English.”
“Is that your drinky-poo talking, Colin,” I asked, “or are you practicing slumming so you’ll get good at it?”
“I’m working on a story.”
“Is it about a Harvard guy who slums in the bars of Somerville, picking on proletarian Midwestern ethnic types?”
“It’s about a proletarian Midwestern ethnic type,” he admitted.
“You’re buying this next round,” I told him. “WASP tax.” I whipped up a theory on the spot; I’m sure it’s full of holes. “Lots of people out in Ohio, or wherever, just marry the first girl who’s nice to them—”
“So ‘girls’ aren’t people?” Colin interrupted. He even flicked his fingers to make visual quotation marks around the word girls. I just went on. Colin was obviously just engaging in reflexive critique anyway.
“One handjob under the bleachers; one flash of leg, and painted nails, and pink cotton panties from under an oversized OSU sweatshirt, that’s all it takes. We’re hooked, see? Because men drink with men, and women only drink at parties. There’s an artificial pussy scarcity in the Midwest. The old 1950s morality is gone, but the supply of vagina hasn’t increased. Withholding sex is just a mercenary thing. That, and being gay is still looked down upon, so . . .” I just trailed off there. I forgot what I was thinking. The whisky was heavy on my tongue. “Why are you even writing a story?”
“Yvette is always talking about her workshop, about her stories, about you—”
“Me?”
“Well,” he said. “Yes.” Colin often said Yes rather than Yeah. One of those class markers he was given to subtly displaying whenever he got the chance. “She thinks you’ll make something of yourself one day.” There was a lot to unpack there. Yvette didn’t think I was anything now. Colin apparently agreed. She thought that might change in the future, and was comfortable enough to share this insight with Colin. And that Colin was jealous of me, and needed to share his jealousy with me, likely in the hope that I would start sweating, lick my lips, blush so hard I’d nearly pass out, and decide that no, no, I won’t ever make something of my fucking self. And that’s what happened. I stormed out of the place, into the cold of a Somerville December. I bought myself three 1.75 liter bottles of vodka, locked myself in my room, and decided that I’d have myself a merry little Christmas all on my lonesome, all on my loathsome. Let Colin win. He can have her. He won’t ever marry her or anything; the Boston Brahmins do arranged marriages, to keep the money in one place and the kids bright-eyed and bucket-chinned. He’ll get bored with her soon enough. Then I wouldn’t have to make anything of myself, prove anything to anyone. I drank till I pissed the bed. It kept me warm, at first.
(8)
“Hurhm,” Alexa said. She rolled her tongue around her teeth whenever she said it.
We’d run into one another again, in a boxcar crowded with freight, and a few passengers, headed up to Berkeley. BART service has been permanently discontinued, the ferries had all sunk thanks
to an ill-conceptualized takeover by enthusiastic Burning Man types who had no idea how to pilot them, and too much of the Bay Bridge had collapsed thanks to sub-par Chinese bolts, so a repurposed freight train using the CalTrain tracks down to Santa Clara and then Union Pacific tracks back north was the best way to get over to the East Bay. We were going to a party by the new fissure that had opened up near the Cal campus. The school itself was no longer a state university, but had become a weird collective of intellectuals and hackers, bringing it into harmony with the rest of town. The reanimated dead roamed the hills and took over most of the south part of the city, where Berkeley bordered Oakland. But the college was in okay shape. Unfortunately, the freight line’s Berkeley stop is on 3rd Street, about a mile and a half from the edge of campus. So we had baseball bats, issued by the jovially named One-Way Dead-End Transport Cooperative. Alexa rolled hers over in her hands. She had a pistol-grip shotgun too, strapped across her back like a girl in a movie. Her wifebeater T-shirt was almost supernaturally white though, not gray and stained to match the sweat on her biceps. I sweated enough for the two of us.
“Don’t hurhm me,” I said.
“Well, I didn’t think you were the type to come out to the East Bay,” she said.
“Free booze.”
“There’s plenty of free booze in the city, if you know where to look.”
“And if you get invited. Drillers tend not to be. Especially when they actually stick with the job for more than two days.”
“Really? Is that it?” Alexa giggled at herself. “Man, it’s like I can’t believe a word you say. I’m so suspicious!”
“Yesss.” I hiss sometimes, especially when it’s hot and I’m thirsty.
“They don’t want to be reminded?”
“They don’t want to hear our detailed anecdotes about drilling the dead.”