Talking to her, he saw that she was younger than he’d thought before—his age, if that. She was thin, with an adult form, but her cheeks seemed to be stubbornly clinging to their baby fat. Her clothes were a size too small and ragged, and she clutched herself against the bitter wind. Her eyes startled him. They were filled with light, and Vance thought it was the light of her seeing him, really seeing him, as a person. Recognition. It wasn’t that common to see this light, whether in a fellow student at school or in a teenage runaway, which is what he dimly realized she was.
“How old are you,” he said.
“Old enough. How old are you? Who do you think you are?”
“I’m no one.”
“What do you really want?”
“Just to help.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. She moved closer to him, and he took a step back. He moved sideways, and she followed him into the street. He walked a little faster, crossing the street to a larger road he hoped would lead out of this neighborhood. She fell in line with him, matching his stride, walking with her arms crossed against the cold.
“You want to party?”
“No, no thanks.”
“Don’t you like to party?”
“No, I don’t like to party.”
“We could have a good time.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re cute.”
“Thanks,” he said. He needed to get away from her and her eyes. Her smell, too: yeasty and fecund, almost unbearably sexual and completely unsexy. He thought he saw the spire of the Transamerica Building or some other tall building downtown, and he crossed the street. She followed.
“I’ll suck your dick,” she said. “You like getting your dick sucked?”
He had never had his dick sucked, though he’d frequently thought about it and guessed he would like it a lot. “Please go away.”
“I can do things,” she said. “I can make you happy.” He felt the money in his pocket, involuntarily. Partly to make sure it was still there, but partly imagining spending it on her. What would that be like? Where would they go? He felt a sick rush thinking of following her into some dark room, light from a curtained window seeping in, a mattress on the floor, the smell of her corrupt body trapped in the air like the smell of day-old bread in a bakery.
He stopped beside the wooded entrance to a darkening green field, San Ysidro Park, according to the sign overhead, framed in a wrought-iron trellis. The strangeness of the day, the neighborhood, the girl, the wind—all of it cast in the unreal light of dusk—made the park, at this moment, feel like an enchanted place, a garden of unknowable delights and terrors. He said, “Why are you following me?”
“See, not cool is it?” She grinned unpleasantly, baring surprisingly white teeth. The abraded welt on her jaw pulsed in the light, sheeny with lymph. “I do what I want, that’s why.”
Vance pulled the money out. She said, “I knew it, come on.” She nodded back the way they’d come. He handed the money to her. She looked at the cash warily, as though he’d handed her a peanut can she guessed was spring-loaded with snakes. “What’s this?”
“Money.”
“For what?”
“For nothing. Go to a clinic. Get some food or something.”
She flipped the money with her thumb and then grinned again. “You get off on making girls feel like trash, is that it?”
“No.”
She studied Vance’s face and smiled. “No, I know what it is,” she said. “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” She pressed the money against the side of Vance’s face and kissed him. It was a long, grinding hateful kiss that he hoped would never end, even as he squirmed away from it. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes with an undertone of sweet rot that emanated from the depths of her person. She said, “Call me if you change your mind,” then put her mouth to his ear and whispered ten numbers.
For a moment or two, she walked backward away from him, under the trellis and into the wooded shadows of the park, then she turned on her sneakered heel and was gone. He watched her go, repeating the number in his head even as he told himself to forget it. Four one five eight seven seven three two one nine. He had to resist the urge to follow her, because why would he follow her? But still he stood there for minutes, frozen by indecision, not to mention by the slicing October bay wind. Four one five eight seven seven three two one nine.
———
Sansome Street was so steep that the Providence Hotel seemed to slowly erect itself from nothing, piercing the violet sky with the soft deco glow of its pink-orange floodlights. Inside, Vance spied Richard’s bearish form across the lobby, still hunched over the bar, as though he’d never left, which he probably hadn’t. Richard looked up as Vance sat down and slurred, “Big day out on the town?”
“It was okay.”
“Yeah, it’s a nice town besides all the queers, hippies, and Chinamen.”
The bartender cast a slanted look down the length of the bar, then went back to cutting limes. The clear liquid in Richard’s conical glass sloshed around in his hand. Vance said, “That’s great. Remember that one for the reading.”
Richard waved his hand. He said, “I’m kidding. Sit down.”
“We need to go. We’re late.”
“You ever think about having that stick surgically extracted from your ass? Modern medicine can do amazing things.” Vance stood. Richard said, “Sorry. Listen, call us a cab. You still have that money I gave you?”
“No.”
“Tell me you didn’t spend it on some kind of a good time.”
“I gave it to someone in need.”
“Of course you did. You ever think that maybe you’re someone in need?”
———
The reading was sponsored by an online literary site called telescopic.com and took place in the Mission District, in an event space, so called—an open warehouse that looked like the kind of place in movies where someone gets shot in the back of the head by someone they trust. The mic was amplified through speakers jerry-rigged from stacked guitar amps that garbled his voice beyond recognition. One interrogatory klieg light was trained on his face, and the rest of the room—stylishly underlit with a wainscoting of Christmas-tree lights—was more or less invisible. The sound, the lights, and his swimming vision all conspired to make him feel he was shouting into an empty room.
He’d been feeling worse and worse since the interview. This, of course, was difficult to judge considering his wretched normal baseline, but even so he felt especially bad. He’d thought another drink at the hotel bar would help, but it seemed to have locked in a throbbing nausea. The nausea, in turn, seemed to radiate out against his chest, making it hard to breathe. He took insufficient little sips of air as he read, and his distorted voice bounced around the huge room, sounding like a deranged announcer in a third-world train station. Welcome to Garblestan, enjoy your stay. Only five more pages and he could stop, sit down, drink something, die. His gorge yo-yoed, spelunked perilously, up from the cavern of his stomach, down the sheer cliff face of his esophagus. His legs felt weak—not an unusual sensation in itself, but a different kind of weakness than the admixture of age, inactivity, and drunkenness to which he was accustomed. He felt numb all over, in fact, like something dead made briefly and shoddily animate, except for his heart, which pounded in his throat with animal speed and fear.
Skipping to the last page, he managed the final paragraph and a few mumbled thank-yous. The walk backstage was a twenty-foot trail of tears. A battered sofa rewarded these herculean exertions, and someone tactfully killed the lights.
———
When he woke, he was in an unfamiliar room painted light blue. Vance’s head floated up into the left side of his peripheral vision like a child’s balloon released into the sky.
“He’s awake,” said Vance to someone else in the room. On the other side, a doctor’s head and shoulders appeared. Richard could instantly tell it was a doctor, not only by the white lab coat he wore but als
o from the general air of disapproval, a response he universally evoked in medical practitioners.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Lazar?”
“What happened?”
“You’re in bad shape.”
“Well, I guess it just goes to show you can exercise and eat right, and still have problems.”
“You appear to have had a cardiac event.”
“That sounds festive.”
“It’s not.” The doctor frowned. “It was an episode of transient angina.”
“I was joking.”
“Transient angina is not an especially funny thing.”
“No, I can see that now.”
“Your EKG came out okay. The episode seems to have been brought on by a state of severe dehydration, itself likely brought on by sustained alcohol consumption. You seem to be in the clear, but we’d like to observe you for a day or two, keep you on fluids and bed rest. I’ll check back in later.” The doctor flashed a wholly insincere smile in Richard’s direction and left the room.
Vance remained where he was, frowning down. “I found you back there. I knew something was wrong, you’d gone all white.”
Richard said, “Spare me the lecture, if you would.”
“Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
Vance looked out the open door, at the yellow glow of the long hallway outside. The kid looked down from beneath the fluorescent lights as he talked, and Richard couldn’t really see his face, though his hair was a delicate wispy crown floating around his head. “I’m going back now. Thanks for letting me come this far, and thanks for paying to get the car fixed. Good luck with everything.”
Richard propped himself up in bed on his elbows. He said, “Look, don’t go.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why? Because I’d like it if you stuck around.”
“Why?” The kid’s face was pink and blotchy, blurred with fatigue.
“Jesus, because I need your help, okay? Because I want some company.”
“I can’t stand around and watch you do this to yourself every night. Are you going to take better care of yourself?”
Briefly, Richard imagined himself as a trench-coated mobster, tasked with taking care of himself. No problem, he thought, he’d take care of that fucking guy. “Like you said earlier, I really don’t understand why you care.”
“Do you care why I care?”
“Sure. Yes.”
Vance paused for a very long time, long enough to allow in the faint sounds of the parking lot outside, an unseen delivery truck beeping as it backed up. “I’ve never looked forward to anything the way I looked forward to meeting you. I know it didn’t mean anything to you, I know it probably still doesn’t, but that’s the truth.” Again, he paused. A nurse clicked efficiently toward them down the long hall. “And I guess I hoped you’d be more like you seem from the books.”
“The books are the best part of me. Probably the only good part.”
Vance sighed, and Richard said, “Listen, I’ve got a question for you. Do you think you could try to lighten up? Just a little? Maybe have some fun? I’ll try to be better if you’ll try to be worse, how about it?”
Before the kid could respond, the nurse was entering the room, massaging Richard’s forearm, sticking a needle into it. A narcotic wind blew through his mind, and all the trash and junk, previously put in neat little piles, was scattered to and fro. Children’s faces floated like exploding stars or paramecia in front of an interstellar, infinitesimal backdrop. Vance seemed to smile and put his hand on Richard’s shoulder. The touch, so tender and knowing, dislocated him in time. He was the father and the child, the child and father. The father of the child who was father to the man.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said his father, then he was gone.
———
The doctor reappeared. He sat in a chair in the corner and gave Richard the expected spiel—another day of bed rest, anticoagulants, taking better care of himself. Richard nodded at the appropriate times, awaiting the inevitable alcohol lecture that had to be coming. But the doctor did two surprising things. First, he pulled a can of something out of his pocket that was covered with a large white sticker reading BEER. He cracked it, and Richard took a sip, wondering if he was dreaming or just the subject of a very cruel joke. But no, it was beer—Budweiser, by the particular creamy sweetness of it. The doctor said, “I’m prescribing you two of these a day to prevent withdrawal.”
Then clasping hairy hands over his crossed knees, he went on, “You know, I read your book.”
“Really.” This was probably the best beer he’d ever tasted.
“Pretty good, I thought. Sagged in the middle.”
“Fair enough.”
“You’re on some kind of promotional tour, the boy said?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you always drink the way he described, or has it been especially much lately?”
Richard imagined Vance talking to the doctor, like his cousin used to tattle on him—talking quietly to his mother’s feet and the yellow-white linoleum of the kitchen—and a small wave of adolescent anger rippled through him. “It’s been especially much lately.”
“I see.” The doctor recrossed his legs the other way and reclasped his hands over them. He said, “Do you think talking about your experiences every night might be playing a role in your behavior?”
“I’m not talking about it.”
“Do you mean every night, or with me?”
“Either,” Richard said. “Both.”
The doctor stood and brushed down his coat. “We’re going to taper you off with a couple of these prescription beers for the next forty-eight hours, and I’m prescribing a low dosage of Klonopin to be taken three times a day, which should help with any minor withdrawal effects you might experience. What you do after that is your business, of course, but if I were you I’d think about sources of this behavior, and I hope you’ll consider treatment of some kind. The next time it might not just be angina.”
Later, the phone, sitting on the counter next to the bed, began vibrating. It was Stan, sounding upset. “The kid, what’s-his-name, called me. You had a heart attack?”
“No, not a heart attack, ‘a minor cardiac event.’ ”
“Look, I’m calling Dana and canceling the rest of this thing.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re not up for it.”
“I’m fine. I’m stopping with the drinking.”
The length of the ensuing pause as Stan considered this statement seemed inversely proportionate to his faith in it. “Really.”
“I can’t keep this up. Look, I’m in here for another day. Call Dana, tell her to nix the LA stops and the flight to Vegas. Vance will take me. Get him a room somewhere, too.”
Stan sighed. “This is a nightmare.”
“No, a nightmare would be if you were being chased by some kind of robot scorpion on wheels with a skull’s face. This is just your job.”
“I knew sending you out was a mistake,” Stan said, finally.
“I tried to stop you, but you wouldn’t listen. Call Vance.”
———
In the middle of the night, Richard got out of bed and limped over to the window, wanting, uncharacteristically, to be reminded there was a world outside. There was, though what he could see of it was mainly a half-empty parking lot delineated by access roads and, in the distance, a complicated interstate cloverleaf. On it, tiny cars do-si-doed around and around one another in a never-ending square dance. Rain fell: not a cleansing rain—the hard, white, driving rain of redemption; not a cinematic rain, either—you couldn’t imagine two lovers joining in the parking lot, clasping each other in the downpour of their own thwarted love; it was a halfhearted, discontent rain, and it pooled everywhere in gummy, black puddles. He was again struck by a sense of the world’s cruddiness. He got back in bed and after a minute found himself s
taring at a pain chart on the wall, a crude line drawing of a child’s face in a progression from mild discomfort (one) to agony (ten). In the drawing of ten on the pain scale, big fat tears leaped from the face’s wide and frightened eyes. He lay back and looked at the ceiling, the same vacant blue as the rest of the room. His legs ached. His chest ached. He missed Victor, the desert, women, being young. Ten—thought Richard—ten, ten, ten.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He drank too much, the doctor had informed him. Now this was big news. From a clinical perspective, he’d drunk too much since he was a teenager. He’d read the pamphlets, knew the amount of alcohol prescribed by those scolds at the American Heart Association: one glass of wine a day, maybe two on rare occasions, like your wedding night or the death of a parent. As far as Richard was concerned, the world as outlined in these articles and surveys was an alternate universe of probity and wise abstention, a wonderland evidently untouched by human worry, frailty, greed, lust, or any of the features of existence that make people drink more than one goddamned glass of red wine a night.
One doctor, long ago dismissed, had suggested if he was having two or more drinks a day, he might have a problem. How many did he estimate he had a week? Well. Here he utilized a complicated formula, a version of which all heavy drinkers employ in doctors’ offices. Something like 7(a/3) − d, where a represents the actual number of daily drinks consumed, and d represents the number of drinks necessary to subtract from the initial lie to get into a normal-sounding ballpark. Whatever number he told the doctor, it was still too high. Presumably doctors have their own counterequations, which they apply to the false numbers they’re constantly given. The doctor edged close to Richard and in a hushed tone suggested AA, intimating that he himself was a member, that it had worked wonders for him. In order to get power over the disease, the doctor said, he’d had to accept his own powerlessness.
The problem, Richard decided that night, over a large glass of warm gin, was his lack of powerlessness. If he felt powerless in the face of alcohol, he would have had no choice but to give it up. After all, who wants their life run, and ultimately ruined, by something over which they have no control? The problem was not that he couldn’t not drink. The problem was that he didn’t want to not drink.
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