Die Young with Me

by Rob Rufus

  She rushed toward him. She grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward her. She let out a deep, guttural noise and then pushed him away.

  “Aren’t things bad enough in this house? Why are you doing this? Why?”

  The rest of her words were incoherent mumbling. She pushed past Nat, disappearing into the dark hall. I heard her stumble up the stairs, crying.

  Nat shook his head. “Mom is losing her fucking grip, man.”

  We were all losing our grip, but no one had let go yet.

  Nat shut the basement door behind him. I let out a long, hopeless sigh.

  2

  A blue envelope arrived in the mail. It was addressed to me. Inside was a check from the Social Security Office for $733.31.

  I asked Dad about it when he got home from work.

  “It’s for disability,” he said. “You can cash it—it’s your money.”

  “I don’t need disability, man.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you do. That’s why I signed you up.”

  “What the hell?”

  “I had to. Your mother’s insurance company is trying to deny some of our recent claims.”

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Because it’s a cold goddamn world, big boy. But it will all be fine. This is just a way to prove that you are, in fact, disabled now. Which means you’ll stay covered until we get this stuff sorted out.”

  More new shitty things.

  “We got a letter saying that—officially—under your mother’s current plan, the definition of a ‘respiratory disability’ has been changed from having less than forty-six percent breathing capacity to having less than forty percent breathing capacity—like they just happened to change her plan the week after we turned in paperwork stating your capacity is up to forty-five percent.”

  “What the hell? Can they do that?”

  “Unfortunately,” he said. “Insurance is one of the biggest rackets of them all.”

  “Is that why all those bills were lying out the other night?”

  “Some of them. Only about two million bucks’ worth,” he said nonchalantly, and slapped my arm. “Don’t let it rattle you.”

  * * *

  A week later, I went to Columbus for a follow-up with Dr. Ranalli. Everyone at the hospital seemed excited to see me. Dr. Ranalli couldn’t believe I’d had the balls to actually get the tattoo. Stacey petted my hair.

  Dr. Ranalli said that he and Dr. Einhorn believed only two more rounds of chemo would be necessary. My blood work was looking good, my tests were looking good—two more rounds, and I’d be on my way to remission.

  Stacey scheduled the first round for the second week of September. While she did paperwork, Mom told Dr. Ranalli about the issues with our health insurance.

  I tried to tune it out. Thinking about all that money made me feel anxious and guilty and just plain sad.

  Millions of dollars . . . millions of hours . . . millions of cells . . . millions of songs . . . millions of days . . .

  Wasted. Stolen. Taken away from us, because of this fucking cancer. I couldn’t think about this. I couldn’t be here.

  Without a word, I stood up and left the room.

  I rushed through the waiting room, keeping my eyes forward and low. I needed to get out. I needed to move forward. The smells, the kids with the missing hair . . . missing limbs . . . deep-set, naked eyes . . . goddammit . . . I just needed to get out. . . .

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Blackest Black

  1

  Ali and I sat in the backyard with our feet in the kiddie pool. The water was lukewarm. The bright blue plastic was now a bleached-out, exhausted version of itself, a signal that the summer had finally run its course.

  Ali looked tired. Or maybe stoned. Maybe both. I didn’t ask these days. She gave me company, and that was enough. She came over a lot that week, the last before school started up again. The combination of the two of us, each on our separate drugs, made for some interestingly weird conversations.

  “Do you think you’ll go back to school at all?” she asked.

  I shrugged and picked another layer of skin off my peeling tattoo.

  “Will they let you graduate if you don’t? Do you think they’d fail you if you’re still too sick to go?”

  “I won’t be ‘too sick,’ ” I said, “not for long. But I still might not go back. Fuck it, you know? I don’t really care if they fail me or not.”

  Ali nodded. Her tan calves were above the water.

  “I don’t want to go back either,” she said. “Not really, anyway.”

  “What do you wanna do instead?”

  She thought it over.

  “Be a lifeguard, maybe.”

  “Yeah? Can you swim? I’ve never seen you do anything at the pool except lie out and smoke cigarettes.”

  “Hey, that’s bullshit!” she said, kicking water up at me. “Okay, okay, I don’t, like, swim—but I wade.”

  “You wade?”

  She nodded. “Yep. I wade.”

  “I’m not sure wading fits the job requirements.”

  “Oh, I know. I figured they’d hire me for my tits.”

  It was hard to argue with her logic.

  We both zoned out and looked up at the cloudless sky. Our toes made ripples in the shallow pool as we spent our last summer days in our summer daze.

  2

  School was back in session. My parents were back at work.

  I was back on the floor. I dozed through my afternoons to the soothing sounds of daytime TV trash. I hated it. I tried to exercise—but I couldn’t. I was too weak. I was in too much pain. So mostly, I slept.

  By the second week, it got to be too much. I didn’t feel like sleeping—I was all slept out. I didn’t want to lie on the goddamn floor. I didn’t want to watch shitty TV.

  What I wanted to do—what I needed to do—was play drums.

  But this opened the door to problems reaching way beyond my breathing.

  For one thing, I wasn’t supposed to lift my arms higher than a tabletop. Whenever I did, the skin in my underarms stretched. Although the staples had been removed, the wound across my chest was still fresh. Too much strain on the skin could open it back up.

  For another, the nerve damage in my hands and feet would make it nearly impossible to grip drumsticks. Plus, Mom would murder me if she heard me practicing drums already. . . .

  But I had to do it.

  I couldn’t wait any longer. All I had was the band, and if I was going to get us back where we belonged, I was going to have to start playing.

  * * *

  I tried to think of my body as a new body—one learning a skill from scratch. That meant starting slow, easing my way back into the groove.

  I decided to start with the core elements—snare, kick, cymbal—just enough to get my limbs comfortable coordinating again. I would start with the same standard two/four beat that I’d learned to master when we first took to the basement.

  I needed to practice in secret—no one could know that I was playing again, not until I got an official okay from the doc. Privacy meant avoiding the practice space. If the band claimed the underground, I needed to go higher.

  I decided on Nat’s old bedroom. He never used it anymore; he always slept in the basement. There were two locks on the door. It was perfect.

  It took all day to move the equipment I needed upstairs from the basement.

  I put a plastic warm-up pad on a snare stand. It had the same bounce as a real snare drum, but none of the noise or kickback. I brought my kick-drum pedal up, but I didn’t bring the drum—it was too heavy to carry. So I just duct-taped the pedal onto the floor and taped a pillow to the wall in front of it for impact—now I could practice technique without a lot of noise. There wasn’t much I could do to silenc
e my cymbals, so I taped dish towels around them. Now they sounded like cracked wind chimes.

  After I got my practice kit set up, I did a run-through.

  When I hit the practice pad, my left stick flew from my hands. Shit. I wrapped the bottoms of my drumsticks with duct tape. I twisted it so the sticky side was still facing my palms.

  I picked up the stick again. I felt it connect to my palm.

  I hit the pad again. This time, it stayed under my control. I hit it again.

  Even that small amount of movement winded me. I hunched over on my stool, aching horribly. But I heard real drums in my head as I banged on the makeshift practice set. I heard a full kit, echoing loudly off the walls of my brain.

  And so I kept at it.

  * * *

  The school sent Nat home with stacks of homework for me—this year, I was expected to work at the same pace as everyone else. Calculus, Spanish II, Bio II, Health—I tossed it all onto a pile of old magazines and I never looked at it again.

  I didn’t have time for that useless bullshit. In a few weeks I would be sent back to Columbus. While I was home, I needed to focus on drumming, not on calculus problems that didn’t affect me at all.

  I could only stand to practice for about five minutes at a time. My back and chest hurt badly, and my duct-taped drumsticks tore at the skin of my fingers. I hit the drums lightly, a far cry from how I used to pound on them—but no matter how gently I played, every downstroke made me wince in pain.

  I worked in small, frequent intervals, the same way I had exercised before the surgery. I tried to practice five times an hour. That meant no more sleeping in, no more TV bingeing—as soon as everyone was out of the house, I got out of bed and went to work.

  As hard and painful as playing was, the feeling I got afterward (progress!) outweighed the hurt. I’d worked up from a two/four beat to a four/four beat and was slowly relearning my snare rolls. I started to work on accenting a backbeat—the note that sits behind the notes, nudging them along, making them groove, filling songs with energy and sex, and making music worth listening to.

  Beat by beat, I felt myself coming along. I drummed slowly, painfully, and ceaselessly. I played through the hurt.

  It was with that same mind-set that I stubbornly forced myself to exercise again. The pain was horrible, but I knew I wouldn’t make any serious strides drumming until I could build my strength back up. Doing just five or six push-ups was excruciating, and left me breathless to the point of panic.

  But I reminded myself that I’d be in pain either way, so I might as well get something done. If I expected to bend my own destiny, it was time I started pushing.

  3

  The night before I posed for what would be our last band photos, I dyed my growing-in hair jet-black. Eyebrows too; I colored it all the blackest black I could—Halloween black, Danzig black, that unnatural shade of dark that only comes in a bottle. The same bottle my brother used.

  My bangs had grown almost half an inch long, which was nothing short of a miracle. It was still thin in certain patches, but at least it was mostly there. The dye sharpened the arches of my eyebrows, making my eyes glow blue and alive.

  I used Dad’s shoe polish to fill in the spots where my hair was thin—fuck it, it looked believable enough.

  I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. When I took off my glasses, I looked more like my brother than I had since we were little kids—for once we actually looked identical. . . .

  But really, we weren’t identical at all. He was this grown-up now, moving along on a different path. And I was becoming this new thing, fragile in places, harder in others.

  I found that I was beginning to get used to the idea.

  Nat was decked out in black everything. He wore leather shoes. He was braceleted, chained, tattooed, and pierced—he looked like rock ’n’ roll personified (or at least too cool to be sitting in our living room).

  “Is my outfit”—work pants, Social D T-shirt, Fuck Cancer Chucks—“all right?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “You look legit.” He tossed me a small tube of lotion. “Put some of that on your tattoo, man. Those colors will pop bright as shit.”

  I squeezed a gob of lotion out and rubbed it on my forearm—he was right; the clouds grew darker, the stars glowed with purpose. Nat straightened his arm next to mine, and the tattoos blended together as one.

  “Admit it,” he said. “We look good as fuck.”

  * * *

  Brody came over in his standard wife beater and cabbie hat. The three of us were standing in front of a brick wall, in the alley behind our house. Paul said that if he cropped the photo tight, it would look like it’d been taken on a city street.

  He directed the shoot—Stand here. Okay, Nat, move up three inches. . . . Wait. Chin down, Brody—and kept reminding us not to blink. He took the photos with a camera that he’d swiped from school.

  It was a sunny day, and the glare from my glasses made it hard for me to keep my eyes open.

  “The squinting looks fine,” Paul told me, over the sound of shutter snaps. “It makes it look like you’re scowling. Shit, it makes you guys almost look tough.”

  * * *

  After Paul ran out of film, he considered the shoot a wrap. The four of us walked down the alley, toward the front of the house. As we hit the front sidewalk, I saw Doyle leaning against his car. He was parked right in front of Sheena. He waved, smiled.

  Nat looked as confused as I was. Doyle put his hands in his pockets and walked toward us.

  “Hey y’all,” he said.

  “Uh, what’s up?” Nat asked.

  Doyle shrugged. “Brody called and said y’all needed me to come by.”

  Nat looked at Brody. “Well? So what’s up?”

  Brody cleared his throat. “I figured, you know, while we’re taking new band pictures we might as well, like, take some with Doyle in them.”

  “Why?” I snapped.

  Doyle looked between the three of us nervously.

  “Why? Why do you think?” Brody said. He spoke louder now. “Do you even know how many people saw us at those Warped Tour shows, dude? Thousands—­thousands of people, who would recognize Doyle as Defiance of Authority’s drummer. I mean, what if someone—­someone important—had seen our set and loved us, but never caught the band name? If they see a band photo and recognize Doyle, then it would jog their memory. Shit! It could land us a record deal—you never know.”

  “Warped Tour is over,” Nat said. “Rob’s still the drummer of this band.”

  Doyle put his hands up. “Hey, I didn’t know this is why I was supposed to come by. I think it’s somethin’ you boys need to sort out yourselves. I’m gonna split.”

  “No,” Brody said. “Hold up a minute, Doyle. This fucking concerns you too. Rob, we’ve decided that—for the good of the band—we need to start playing shows again. I know that keeping Doyle in the band bums you out, but if we wait any longer we’ll lose all the momentum and exposure we got.”

  “We?” Nat said. “What the hell are you talking about? I’ve never said anything like that—ever.”

  “Me either, dude,” Doyle swore.

  Brody huffed. “Okay—not we, apparently—me. Is that better? And yes, I know Doyle was just supposed to join up for that tour—but plans have obviously fucking changed! If you don’t agree, then you’re kidding yourselves. I mean, you can barely make it up a flight of stairs, Rob! How are you going to play drums? It isn’t going to happen, dude—you need to accept it.”

  “Bullshit,” I mumbled. “That’s fucking bullshit.”

  “He’ll be able to play again,” Paul said.

  “Yeah. Okay. That positive-outlook crap is great and all—but you need to understand that if you do get to the point that you can play again, you’ll have already screwed me, Doyle, and your own brother out of a music
career.” He turned to Nat. “You keep talking about these new songs you’re supposedly writing—don’t you think I already have plans to get them out? Don’t you think I’m already brainstorming on our next move? We can’t just wait around! If we do, everyone will forget us. We’ll be yesterday’s headlines and we’ll have to start from zero, and I refuse to do that. I refuse.”

  “Jesus! Just shut the fuck up,” Paul yelled. “Do you realize how horrible you sound right now?”

  I watched Nat’s fists clench and unclench.

  “Rob only has two more chemotherapies left,” he said slowly. “We are waiting to play any shows, to record any songs, until he is ready to roll. Period.”

  “Yeah,” Doyle said, backing toward his car. “I don’t really feel cool with this, Brody. I mean . . . damn.” He shook his head.

  Brody threw up his hands. He stormed over to his Jeep.

  “You really want to shoot our band—your songs—in the foot, don’t you Nat?” he said, as he opened the door. “You better think this shit over—because I’ve worked too fucking hard to just let you guys blow this.”

  Brody slammed his car door. I didn’t know what to say. I was sweating. I ran my hand through my hair. Streaks of black shoe polish covered my palm.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Symptoms of Me

  1

  On the cancer ward, life doesn’t change.

  The patients are indistinguishable, a collection of hairless lab rats whose owners struggle to tell them apart. The drugs go in, the life goes out. Time is only measured with befores and afters.

  But this time, I felt like an outsider.

  I didn’t feel sick anymore. I didn’t feel good, exactly, but I didn’t feel sick. My hair had grown back. My face looked like me again. My new body was scarred and tattooed, and my muscles brimmed with tension and life. I felt like I was regaining control of myself.

  * * *

  When they injected the first bag of my chemo cocktail, I tasted familiar chemicals.

  But now, I wanted control.

  Stubborn, pointless control, any that I could hold on to at all.