You have never been face-to-face with Mad Moose. You have never wanted to be. And now that you are, you see your life pass before your eyes.
He accuses you of stealing his “shot glass.” You explain, “That’s Mrs. Adams’s thimble,” and immediately you cringe because the words sound so dorky, and sure enough, Mad Moose thunders, “SO WHAT, SWEETHEART?” and repeats his clever joke to everyone around him, and now you’re standing there, with everyone laughing at you, and it’s even WORSE THAN SCHOOL because there’s no place to run to, and you realize that Jay is a total rotten betraying creep for inviting you here, and that you NEVER should have even THOUGHT of coming, and you look around again for Alex so you can SPLIT.
And then, out of nowhere, Jay appears. He puts his arm around you and tells Mad Moose, “If you’re going to insult my friend, you’re out of here”—and Bud’s with him too, backing him up.
My heroes.
Anyway, Mad Moose mumbles something and walks away. You’re happy to escape with your life.
Meanwhile, you’re looking around for Alex again and he’s NOWHERE, and Jay is ANNOUNCING stuff to Bud—ol’ Duckmeister and I were like bros, we did EVERYTHING together, like the time we broke the basement window yada yada yada…
And then, like a shot, Jay is off chasing Sam, who is heading out the back door with a large, expensive-looking liquor bottle.
You and Bud follow. The coolness of the night air feels great. The quietness does too, except that Jay’s over by the garage, yelling at Sam for stealing his dad’s scotch.
Another group of guys is sitting on the blacktop below the basketball hoop—and you notice that THEY have bottles too. And Jay starts yelling at them, but they’re saying, hey, take it easy, we BROUGHT these, and it’s only BEER, and besides, we’re not in your house, are we?
That’s when you spot Alex again. He’s alone, lurking in the shadows near the house.
You call his name, but he just walks inside without answering you.
You run in after him. You search the house. He’s nowhere. Vanished.
You duck out the front. You see someone far down the street, walking away. You can’t tell for sure that it’s Alex, but you guess it is. You figure he’s doing the smart thing, leaving.
Which YOU should do too, but you can’t, because your car is wedged in by a double-parked Jeep Cherokee.
So you go inside to find out whose car it is, but you’re too chicken to ask around, so you end up watching a horror movie on the VCR in the den, which only makes you tired and bored and wastes an hour and a half.
In retrospect, THIS was your big mistake.
After the movie you walk out of the den, and the first thing you see is that the living room is no longer a living room. It’s a mosh pit. Guys are ramming into each other, hollering. Someone has moved the furniture off to the sides, but not the stuff ON it. So you run around the room, closing the piano top, putting Mrs. Adams’s Steuben glass figurines in safer places—because SOMEONE’S GOING TO HAVE TO ANSWER FOR THIS.
Then you notice the liquor cabinet. It’s open. Guys are pouring drinks, and Jay is nowhere in sight.
But Alex is. He’s slumped in an armchair, a bottle in his hand, just staring at everyone with this weird smile.
You run over to him. You kneel down and talk. You ask if he’s okay. He keeps saying, fine, fine, don’t worry, everything’s great. But he’s slurring his words, and his eyes are red, and he seems to be in a whole other world.
And then someone JACKS UP THE MUSIC. You’re right near the speakers, and you feel like someone is punching you in the ear.
You jump away. You run to turn it down.
And there’s Jay, standing by the stereo, a beer in hand, SINGING ALONG!
You turn the volume down, and everyone starts screaming at you. You try to explain to Jay that Alex is in bad shape and you need to talk to him—but Jay doesn’t even listen. He just says, “Lighten up, Duckman,” and jacks the volume back up.
Louder.
Calmly you turn it back down, to medium-loud.
You are standing toe to toe with Jay now. In each other’s faces. You smell the alcohol on his breath. He looks furious. You know he’s NOT REALLY LIKE THIS. Deep inside, he’s not an obnoxious Cro Mag. He’s just a little drunk. But you’re also losing patience. You suggest in a firm voice that maybe HE’S lightened up a little TOO MUCH.
Mistake. Jay slams his drink down on the stereo cabinet. He starts SPEWING. Loud. So everybody can hear: “That’s it, Ducky, mess up my party! Make EVERYBODY mad! You can’t change, can you? I think of ways to HELP you, I fix you up with BABES, I tell all these guys what a DUDE you are, I invite you to my party, I STICK UP FOR YOU against Mad Moose, who could probably kill me—and what do YOU do? What kind of friend are YOU? THIS is how you thank me?”
You try to speak. You try to calm him down. Fat chance.
Jay is practically spitting in your face: “I give you all these chances to be a NORMAL GUY, and what do you do? Act like a WIMP. Maybe that’s the way you ARE, huh? Maybe there’s a REASON you can’t meet girls! Maybe I’m wasting my breath and all these guys are RIGHT about you—”
That does it. You see stars. You want to grab his bottle and hit him over the head.
You raise your fists.
Come on, Jay says.
Fight! Yells the pack behind you.
You almost do it. You almost jump on him.
But you don’t. You can’t. Your eyes are filling with tears.
So you do the only thing you CAN do.
You LEAVE.
You don’t care if the Jeep is still blocking your car. You’ll drive onto the sidewalk if you have to.
Jay doesn’t try to hold you back. As you walk through the living room, the volume shoots back up to ear-splitting.
You expect to see Alex still in the same chair, but he’s not.
Part of you wants to go without him, but that wouldn’t be right, so you go outside and walk around the house, looking. Then in through the back door again for a quick check inside, but you don’t see him at all and you hate being here and you are LOSING PATIENCE with the amazing disappearing friend, so you decide to check upstairs and if he’s not there, tough, you are GONE.
And that is where you finally see him. At the bathroom door. Struggling to turn the knob. In one hand he is holding the bottle of gin. It is almost empty.
You ask: Did you drink ALL of that?
Alex spins around, like you shocked him. He mutters something about having to go to the bathroom.
You can barely understand him. It’s only been a few minutes since you last spoke to him, but he seems drunker.
You reach for the knob. It’s a little tight, but you can turn it.
As you open the door, you explain that after he’s done, you are driving him home.
He says nothing, goes inside, and slams the door behind him.
You listen for retching noises, but all you hear is running water. You sink to the carpet outside the door. No one else is upstairs. Now that you’re alone, now that you can THINK and not feel like people are STARING at you and wondering how you could have been invited, you realize how tightly you are wound up. You want to cry, but you CANNOT give Jay the satisfaction of finding you in tears. You SHOULDN’T be here anyway, and you WOULDN’T be here if it weren’t for Alex, if he weren’t in such bad shape.
And you start to beat yourself up, because you know that YOU’RE the reason Alex is so drunk. If YOU hadn’t insisted on taking him to the party, if YOU hadn’t left him right at the beginning, if YOU hadn’t gone off and watched a stupid grade-Z movie—if you hadn’t NEGLECTED your friend WHO WAS DEPRESSED TO BEGIN WITH—none of this would have happened.
So you sit there, grinding your teeth, waiting and waiting as the water runs inside.
And then you notice something.
The running water is not the sound of a SINK.
It’s louder. It’s a SHOWER.
You knock. Everything okay? You ask.
>
Alex says yeah, fine.
So you sit back and wait.
The shower lasts a long time. Too long. In Alex’s state, you realize he’s liable to fall asleep standing up. And if he falls on the tiles, he could break a bone, hit his head…
You knock again.
No answer.
You call his name.
You yell his name.
Nothing.
You turn the doorknob.
It’s locked.
Now you’re panicked. You bang on the door with your fist. You push with your shoulder, but the door won’t budge.
You need help. You need a key.
The last person IN THE WORLD you want to talk to is Jay, but you have to. You have no choice.
You race downstairs. Jay is in the kitchen, raiding his own refrigerator.
You grab him by the arm and tell him what happened.
For a moment a strange expression plays across his face, like he doesn’t know what to do, yell at you, apologize, what?
But he catches on. He runs upstairs, and you follow close behind, asking WHERE HE KEEPS THE KEY.
WHAT KEY? He asks. WHO EVER KNOWS WHERE THE BATHROOM KEY IS?
You get to the bathroom, and now you see a stain seeping under the door and onto the hallway carpet, growing in a dark semicircle.
Jay yells—OPEN THE DOOR, YOU’RE FLOODING THE BATHROOM—and bangs hard, but still all you can hear is the running water, splashing onto the floor tiles inside.
Together the two of you charge the door. Your shoulders hit with a loud thud.
You step back and try again.
The third time, the door cracks. The wood splits down the middle.
You kneel to charge again, but Jay stops you. He says if we break the door, we’ll hurt ourselves. Instead, he steps back and gives the door a karate kick.
His shoe goes right through. So does half his leg. He yells in pain, and you kick like crazy, and soon a big chunk of the door gives way, and Jay pulls his leg out and you’re able to reach in and turn the knob from the inside.
You push the door open and run in.
The air is thick with steam. The room smells faintly of alcohol. Alex’s bottle is on the floor, floating in the bathwater that has spilled over the side of the tub.
The shower curtain is drawn shut.
You splash through the water and pull the curtain aside.
Alex is sprawled out in the tub, the water almost covering his face. He is fully clothed.
And unconscious.
You turn off the water. Jay is reaching into the water, hooking his arms under Alex’s shoulders. You grab Alex’s feet, and the two of you pull him out.
Alex is groaning now, moving his head from side to side. You manage to set him on the closed toilet, and he’s blinking and looking from you to Jay. “What are you doing?” he asks.
Which seems like the strangest question he can ask in this situation, so you say the only thing you can: “What are you doing?”
Jay is kneeling beside him, his arm still tightly around Alex’s shoulder. You have NEVER seen the expression that’s on Jay’s face. He looks wild-eyed, totally freaked out.
Jay’s voice is pitched about an octave higher than normal. What are you, STUPID? he yells. Who said you could DO this? Can’t you wait until you’re HOME?
Alex mumbles something about getting drunk and wanting to take a shower to sober up—but Jay keeps scolding him, telling him AT LEAST he could have left the DRAIN open like a NORMAL person—and despite this, Jay is wiping tears from his cheeks. Or maybe it’s not tears. Maybe it’s the humidity in the room.
You’re a basket case yourself. You’re in total shock. All you want to do is get Alex out of here.
You and Jay stand him up. Alex can barely walk, so you stand on either side of him and prop him up.
Slowly, carefully, you make your way to the landing and down the stairs. Alex is dripping water, and it’s hard to hold onto him, but you manage to do it, across the living room and out the front door.
All around you, guys are yelling and cheering. “Way to go, ALEX!” shouts one. “First casualty of the night!” shouts another.
They have no clue. They think this is FUN.
You and Jay drag Alex across the lawn to your car. The double-parked Jeep, fortunately, is gone.
You dump Alex in the backseat. He tries to say something but immediately keels over and closes his eyes.
Jay mutters a few choice angry words, the nicest of which is jerk. But as you climb in and start the car, he says, “Take care of him. And call me, okay?”
You nod and drive off.
Your hands are a little shaky. Your shoes are wet and slippery on the accelerator. You have to concentrate like crazy just to drive, and you go REALLY slowly.
Your mind is racing. Where do you take him now—home? Out for a cup of coffee? Isn’t coffee supposed to be good for drunkenness? Can you walk into a restaurant soaking wet?
You can’t decide. You drive around the block. Then you drive in the direction of Las Palmas. You follow the edge of the park, just cruising, thinking.
And soon you hear sniffling from the backseat. You figure Alex is getting a cold, but that’s not it.
He’s crying.
You realize you are too. You ask if he’s okay.
He says he’s sorry for getting your car wet.
You tell him that’s okay, the seats are vinyl, and worse has happened to them.
You look at him through the rearview mirror, but he’s looking away. He’s sobbing now, apologizing for being drunk and for using the shower. He keeps insisting that he only wanted to sober up, that’s all—saying it over and over, as if you wouldn’t believe him.
You keep reassuring him and soon you both fall silent. The cars whiz by outside, and you hear someone’s car stereo booming away, and it all feels very eerie and uncomfortable, the two of you driving aimlessly, and you can’t help feeling that Alex wants to say something but he’s not saying it.
You ask him if he wants to go home, but he says no. So you decide to take him to your house.
By the time you arrive, Alex’s face is bone-white. That’s when he gets sick, in the flower bed by the side of the house.
As you lead him into the house, he is moaning, stumbling, making these dry clicking noises with his throat. You sit him down on the living room sofa and place an empty wastebasket nearby, just in case. Then you fetch some clothing from upstairs.
As he changes, he apologizes again and again—I shouldn’t have done it, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was drunk, I didn’t mean it—and you calm him down, shushing him, saying don’t worry, no one at the party even noticed, it’s only water, just try to sleep, etc.
The clock chimes II and you realize Mrs. Snyder must be freaking out. You mention this to Alex and he says he doesn’t want to go home, so you offer him a place to stay for the night if he contacts his mom and lets her know.
You bring in your cordless phone. He calls her and she agrees, but you notice that while he’s talking to her, his voice is quivering—and after he hangs up, he starts sobbing. WAILING. Like a little boy.
Don’t EVER tell anybody what happened tonight, he says. Promise me, Ducky. It has to be a secret. It doesn’t go past you and me. And tell that to Jay too.
Sure, sure, I say.
Scout’s honor?
Scout’s honor.
And then he looks at you with these wet, wet eyes, and tells you that YOU’RE the only person he can talk to about this stuff. YOU’RE the only person he can trust. You and Dr. Welsch—you two are like EXTENSIONS of himself, he says.
You didn’t realize you MEANT that much, so now all of the things you’ve done—sitting with him at lunch when no one else would, stopping to talk to him at the bridge in Las Palmas, sticking with him through this whole horrible episode—all of it seems worth it, in some strange way.
He’s lying on the sofa now, his voice slurring and fading, and he’s complaining about a hea
dache, so you go get some aspirin, and by the time you’re back, he’s fast asleep.
So you sit, watching. Listening to him breathe. Trying to figure out WHAT ON EARTH JUST HAPPENED.
You have had some weird nights in your life. Driving the girls home when the upperclassmen trashed Ms. Krueger’s house and framed the 8th-graders. Tracking down Sunny on Venice Beach the night she ran away from home.
This is weirder somehow.
You don’t know why, it just is.
So you sit and write.
And here you are, still at it.
Scared and exhausted. Worried.
Why did he DO that? Why did he get so drunk? Alex doesn’t drink. And WHY would he TAKE A SHOWER—with his clothes on—with the drain closed?
He was in a hurry? He was too drunk to know what he was doing? He flipped the drain switch by accident?
WEIRD.
TOO weird.
Have to stop thinking about this.
Have to stop WRITING.
Fatigued.
Need sleep.
Good n
It Is Two A.M.
Do You Know Where Your Sanity Is?
The drain.
It’s down the drain.
It MUST be, to have the dream you just had.
You have switched places with Alex. You are inside him, at Jay’s party. You’re feeling depressed and you don’t like anyone there, and everyone’s drinking and it seems like a good thing to do, at least SOMETHING to do, so you grab a bottle and start swigging. And suddenly everything seems less loud, less obnoxious—just less—and you like the feeling for awhile until it takes you over, and now you’re starting to feel worse and worse, because, like they tell you in school, alcohol is a DEPRESSANT and what could be worse for DEPRESSION than that? So you sink and sink, but you’re already at rock bottom, so what happens?
You go below, you go under, you question why you’re at the party, you question why you’re even ALIVE, and what’s worse, you desperately have to go to the bathroom, but the one downstairs is being used, so you trudge to the one upstairs, and all you want to do is relieve yourself, but you’re in there, and the lights are bright and you see yourself in the mirror—PASTY and TIRED and STRINGY-HAIRED and SAD—and you see the shower and the gleaming tub and you decide THAT’S what you need, so you turn on the water and step in but you’re not thinking, you’re not SOBER enough to take your clothes off, and the next thing you know you’re sitting down, tired and soothed by the warmth, and you know you’re going to fall asleep, slip downward, downward—and your hand reaches for the drain because you WANT the tub to fill, because maybe if you sink far enough, if you sleep deep enough, you won’t have to come back.
Diary One Page 35