by Sam Lansky
“Isn’t that Leroy over there?” I said.
“Who?” Annalise said. “You know I don’t go below Fourteenth Street. At least not sober.” I didn’t yet know this, but it was good to keep in mind. And indeed, while the shots I’d taken in the cab had left me feeling woozy, they only seemed to prime Annalise for the afternoon ahead. She walked more confidently now in her stilettos. She wore white jeans and a floral top that made her hair look even darker and shinier, and her ass wiggled as she moved, like the street was her catwalk.
At the event, well-heeled freshmen milled around; many of them seemed to know one another. Annalise and I smoked cigarettes on the terrace. We had come too late and missed the remarks, the food, and any sort of camaraderie.
“Isn’t there a bar?” Annalise said, scowling. “I want a glass of Riesling.”
“Everyone here is underage,” I said.
“Should we kill ourselves?”
“Probably.”
Annalise shrugged. “Well, at least we dropped by to let everyone know who we are, and that we’re cool.”
I nodded. At that moment, this seemed like the most important thing we could have done.
My father drove me up to Vassar in Jennifer’s car, unloading my things in suitcases and boxes. After I’d moved to New York, then had most of my things put in storage when he’d moved out of the apartment on the West Side, my worldly possessions had been pared down to a surprisingly lean array of clothes and books.
My brother’s roommate and best friend at college had a younger brother who was also matriculating at Vassar that same year; his name was Nate. We sent messages to each other in August and decided to request each other as roommates, although we hadn’t met.
I arrived first. Our room was in the historic main building in the center of campus, in a tower up a winding flight of stairs. It felt like a boarding school dream. Big windows looked out onto landscaped grounds, and the floorboards creaked. If it was grand, it was also pretty utilitarian—a thin twin mattress, a desk and a dresser on each side.
We went to Bed Bath & Beyond somewhere in the Hudson Valley and I roamed the aisles idly. It was inconceivable that I would be living here for the next four years. There were so many other families shopping there, too—the air was thick with it, the excitement, the optimism. I felt so old and tired and used up.
My father, trying to make the most of a bad situation, offered opinions on patterns for bedsheets, but the light had disappeared out of his eyes. I asked for more things—more pillows, more things to hang on the walls—but he shook his head no.
Maybe he suspected that I would try to return those items and keep the cash. He wasn’t wrong.
Nate’s parents were in the room when we got back, along with Nate; my father had met them before, when taking my brother to school. They were all there, Nate’s brothers and both of his parents, brimming with good cheer. They marked such a sharp contrast to my father and me.
It wasn’t what I had imagined in my happiest moments, nor was it how I had feared it could be at its very worst—it was an anticlimax, a rite of passage that felt more like a resignation to a decision we both already knew was probably a mistake.
Nate was friendly. On some level, it registered quickly that I’d be able to walk all over him, although I already felt guilty for that thought.
I walked my father back to his car, parked on the far edge of campus. The sun had gone down. He hugged me.
“Good luck, Sam,” he said. There was a tightness in his jaw and an expression on his face that was unfamiliar. It almost seemed like he was worried he might never see me again.
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why.
“I’ll be fine, Dad,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure there’s, like, a lot going on this week,” Annalise said the following morning. We were sharing a cigarette outside my dorm, Annalise in comically large sunglasses, both of us clutching oversize coffees. Parents still moving in their kids glared at us.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know—there’s a barbecue, I think?”
I side-eyed her. “Do you want to go to that?”
“Of course not,” she said, bristling. It was automatic: obviously we weren’t doing this. I checked the time. I had a meeting with an academic adviser at 3:00 p.m. and it was only eleven—that left more than enough time to get high. “I’ll meet up with you later,” I said.
On my way back to my dorm, my resident adviser, whom I’d met while moving in the previous day, stopped me in the hallway. “Sam,” she said. I’d already forgotten her name.
“Hey, you,” I said by way of greeting.
“There’s a fun barbecue in the quad,” she said. “Don’t you want to get to know people?”
“Of course!” I said. “I just have to do something first. I’ll be right there.” I flashed her a smile.
In my bedroom, I packed a bowl and hit it quickly, then fished around in my bag. I’d gone to a new doctor just before leaving the city, bringing the empty prescription bottles from May that I had saved as proof that I’d been prescribed these drugs before; he’d happily written me new prescriptions for Adderall, Xanax, and Ambien—plus, I had a few painkillers I’d found in Jennifer’s apartment. I took a Xanax and opened my laptop.
When I woke up it was dark outside. I was under the covers fully dressed, sweating, confused.
It wasn’t until I turned on the lights, waking up Nate, that I remembered where I was. Oh. Right. College.
The next night at convocation, we gathered in a beautiful old church to hear remarks from the administration, but I couldn’t focus. Annalise found me and sat down next to me.
“This is boring,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“I already drank all the wine I brought from the city,” she said.
“How?”
She looked pained. “It’s been a really stressful day,” she said. She took a Klonopin.
“We need to go buy alcohol,” I said.
“Have you met anyone who has a car?” she asked. “Should we call a taxi to take us to the liquor store? Do they have car services out here?”
A boy in the pew ahead of us turned around, extending a hand.
“You guys have IDs?”
Annalise and I looked at each other. “Obviously,” she said.
And soon we were speeding off into the town of Poughkeepsie in his Mercedes. He was a slick kid from New Jersey; he didn’t seem like a fit for Vassar. Then again, neither did we.
He drove too fast and kept looking over at Annalise’s lithe body as she twisted and twirled in the passenger seat to the beat of pounding electro. I smoked a cigarette out the window in the backseat, luxuriating in the moment.
College! I thought.
Annalise and I prowled through the liquor store, pulling bottles and stacking them in our basket. He had given us his credit card.
“Buy whatever you want,” he said.
Swiping it at the register, Annalise looked at me.
“I can’t believe it took this long to find somebody who wanted to fuck me,” she said. She grinned. “This is going to be a great year.”
I settled in quickly, but not well. Annalise was a dangerous friend to have, and she no doubt felt the same about me—we took the train back to the city most weekends, about ninety minutes each way, partying at clubs downtown and crashing wherever we could. I wouldn’t have thought to tell my father that I was in town.
I registered for classes: A freshman seminar in memoir, where I wrote a piece about Dean, twice as many pages as had been assigned. We went around the room and read our work aloud, and I could feel my classmates’ eyes boring into me as I read on and on and on—they could see right through me. By the end, my face was flushed from embarrassment; I had imagined that they would laugh and gasp, but instead their faces were expressionless except for some vague irritation at my overlong piece.
I dropped the class.
A course in l
inguistics, where I met an upperclassman who lived in the town houses on the other side of campus. Somehow, I figured out that she knew where to get cocaine, and we began doing it together after class each Thursday.
A philosophy class, where kids growing out their mustaches pontificated on Sartre. “The kind of people who want to take a freshman philosophy class are not my kind of people,” I said to Annalise.
“I don’t think our kind of people are in Poughkeepsie,” she said.
A modern dance class, which I only went to when I was high.
It never occurred to me that I was really there to study. I turned in all my assignments late. On weeknights, I got high in my room and studied the effects of strange mixes of pills: What would sixty milligrams of Adderall do if I took it with four milligrams of Klonopin?
“Can you snort Klonopin?” Annalise asked me. “I don’t know why I never thought to do it before.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t permeate the mucus membrane very well. Better to just take it orally.”
“Bottoms up,” she said, and we each swallowed a pill with a glass of rosé.
Through my weed dealer, I met a girl who sold painkillers out of her room in the town houses across campus; she had two enormous bottles of Dilaudid and morphine.
“My dad’s a surgeon,” she said with a wicked smile.
I started off buying two or three at a time. The Dilaudid, in pale blue tablets, was good to snort; the morphine had to be taken orally, but it hit harder if it was crushed and dissolved in a beverage. I liked to put it in an energy drink, or a cold glass bottle of chocolate milk, which they sold in the bookstore.
I sipped it as I walked around campus: a strange, nostalgic delight.
One weekend in mid-September, Annalise and I took the train back to the city, declaring that we were done with the Hudson Valley.
“Fuck Vassar,” I said proudly as we walked to the train station in Poughkeepsie.
“Yeah,” she said. “Fuck Vassar.”
In the city, we went to Ronan’s house. I arrived with a mélange of pills, uppers and benzos and painkillers, and we drank gin-and-tonics, and we must have called for coke at some point because magically, one minute, it was there.
In flashes, little glimmers of memory across a period of hours, I remember Annalise dancing, half naked, her breasts shaking to the rhythm of Swedish pop blasting on the stereo. At some point I must have texted Robert, the guy I had smoked meth with the fall before, because when the sun was rising I was stumbling out of his apartment, electrified, my jaw stiff and that sour chemical taste in my mouth. Then I found another guy, a handsome banker in the West Village who had posted an ad online saying that he wanted to go “skiing.”
Somehow I made it down to his apartment, and there was a platter of cocaine that looked mountainous, sparkling lustrous white, and I thought how wonderful it was that we wouldn’t run out for hours, days even.
I was in bed with him, this stranger, when I got the first call, from Jennifer. I silenced the ringer and let it go to voice mail. She called several more times over the following hour, leaving messages, which I ignored.
I didn’t know what she wanted, but it seemed unlikely that it was more important than what I was doing.
The calls began to irritate me, and eventually I picked up my phone to listen to Jennifer’s messages. Her voice was grave and rough from crying.
“Sam. Your dad—he’s had a heart attack. We’re taking him to Mount Sinai. You need to get here as soon as you can.”
“Sam. Where are you?”
“Sam. We’re at the hospital. Call me as soon as you get this message.”
“Sam. Call me, Sam.”
I hung up the phone and tossed it onto the floor.
“My dad just had a heart attack,” I said, to nobody; it wasn’t really directed at the stranger in bed next to me.
I couldn’t feel anything. Nothing except perhaps a minor annoyance, a sense of being inconvenienced, the absurdity of what poor timing this was.
“Shit,” the guy said. “Do you need to, like, go?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure you shouldn’t—”
“It’s fine,” I said curtly. “I’m gonna do another line.”
How could I leave? It seemed that as long as I stayed there, in that anesthetic inertia, the morbid reality of what was going on just a few miles north wouldn’t become real, wouldn’t end this bender on a sour note. I pulled the stranger close into me and kissed him, frozen-mouthed, the sound of our teeth clicking against each other, and I pretended like nothing had happened.
And that was where I stayed for the rest of the day, while my phone kept buzzing on the floor, over and over again, just loud enough to hear.
We ran out of drugs sooner than I’d expected—it was odd how that always seemed to happen—and so I left. Standing outside on Christopher Street, in the blearily sore-throated daze of the second day of a cocaine run—this was, I was sure, the worst feeling in the entire world—it occurred to me that there was nowhere I wanted to go. Fear paralyzed me. It had been six hours since Jennifer had first called.
I went back uptown to Ronan’s house to clean myself up, but once I got there, I just settled on the stoop outside. For the next hour or so, I remained there, staring out numbly, speechlessly. The sun was shining; it was hurting my eyes; I was coming down hard; I felt like a vampire.
Annalise came outside and sat down next to me on the stoop, hugging her knees. “You need to go,” she said. “You need to be with your family. What if he dies, Sam? What if he’s already gone?”
Strange feelings were beginning to claw at me and there was nothing to stuff them down with, no more drugs left to take, no more booze in the fridge. Thinking about showing up trashed at the hospital, I resolved I really couldn’t move.
“I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t.”
And then, with the wearied, self-pitying gravity that I had mastered, I took a cab across town to Mount Sinai.
I walked slowly into the hospital. In his room, my father was hooked up to wires and tubes, looking small and so frail in that paper gown. My father, who had always seemed to me a statue of well-tailored confidence, now looked so broken—and as numb as I felt in that postcomedown melancholia, my breath still stuck in my throat when I saw him lying there.
Jennifer’s face was red from crying. As I leaned down to hug my dad, it occurred to me that I probably reeked of liquor and sex, and my nose was running—and I prayed, Please, God, let that just be snot instead of another nosebleed—so I pulled away rapidly, wiping my nose anxiously, coughing as though I were suffering from a head cold. When I looked back at my father, his face was contorted in a mask of concern and pain. Was it for him or for me? I stood by his bed while monitors beeped and halogen lightbulbs hummed, and I tried not to dull a flurry of competing thoughts. How strange that this extraordinary human drama had been unfurling in my absence. How strange to confront these emotions now when my day had started off so ordinary in its mundane debauchery.
“Sam,” Jennifer said, “are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
On the street, I joined the smokers outside the hospital door. A few nurses in scrubs, a few people who just looked tired. I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror. I looked tired, too.
Soon I’d be eighteen. It wasn’t fun anymore, the way I lived my life—it was just exhausting. I was getting too old for this, I knew, but I couldn’t conceive of a way to stop it.
I went back to Ronan’s house. He and Annalise seemed concerned, but I didn’t know what to say.
I drank myself to sleep and passed out in Ronan’s brother’s room for what felt like a hundred years. I had to wake up early to go see my father in the hospital. I had to.
But the following morning, I realized that I was out of cash, somehow—I couldn’t remember where it had all gone. I walked to an ATM with Annalise and tried to take out a cash advance with the emergenc
y credit card my father had given me, but it had been canceled. All I had was my return train ticket to Poughkeepsie and my meal card. I didn’t even have money left on a MetroCard.
“I can’t go,” I said. “How am I going to get across town?”
Annalise didn’t have any cash, either. We had to get to the train station at 125th Street. “Some cabs take credit cards, right?” she said.
“Yes!” I said. “They have those readers in the back. We just have to find one.”
We wandered up and down West End, trying to hail a taxi; the drivers rolled down their windows, Annalise shrieked, “Do you take American Express?” and then, quickly, they would speed away. We went into a subway station and bought a MetroCard on her credit card, then took the subway up to 125th Street, where we waited for the crosstown bus to take us to catch the train. It felt like an odyssey.
On the train back to Vassar, I put on my headphones and disappeared into the ebb of the music, trying not to think about my father alone in the hospital.
When I returned to campus, I had an email from him. “I’m in a different room—way nicer!” it read. “Learning about my heart, drugs, diet, exercise, doctors. A good, intense education. Feeling totally fine—ready to get out of here, but probably not allowed until tomorrow or Wednesday.”
I wrote back: “I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. I love you.”
He replied quickly. “Thanks, Sam,” he wrote. “What happened to you on Sunday? I thought you were coming to see me.”
It hurt too much to respond, so I closed my computer. I crushed a tablet of morphine with my gilded razor and dissolved it into a bottle of chocolate milk.
At a party, I met a slender-hipped boy named Patrick; I took him back to my dorm room and pushed him up against the wall, thrusting into him.
I swallowed Ecstasy with a stoner dude and his curvy girlfriend and we triple-kissed, dissolving into a mass of limbs.
There were two handsome boys named Jamie and Thomas who had begun dating just when school started. I flirted with both of them; eventually I decided it was Thomas, who was sturdily built and blond, whom I wanted more than Jamie, who was slim and dark-featured. But Thomas was smart enough to steer clear of me. I hated this, so one night at a different party, I got drunk with Jamie; we ended up making out in front of his dorm.