Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  Mr. Lutkenhouse was bent over, trying to get a better handle on me, when Kyle saw that I was the one getting beat up. In an instant, Kyle was on Mr. Lutkenhouse’s shoulders trying to get him to let go of me, while I was flailing around as if I were in one of those Laurel and Hardy skits where the little guy’s arms are too short to punch the big guy. Somehow he managed to shake Kyle off him while holding me in the air by my collar. He then carried me down a flight of stairs to the principal’s office, where he threw me over the counter, and I landed on top of the rather surprised secretary, Yvette. Looking back at the door, I saw Mr. Lutkenhouse leaning against the doorjamb, trying to catch his breath. His face was covered in blood.

  “Oran? Is that you?” I heard Wendy’s voice from the principal’s office.

  I tried to answer, but nothing came out. I felt fine for a minute, but panicked when I realized that I wasn’t able to move or breathe. Eventually I was able to take some small breaths, which then turned into rapid, shallow hyperventilation. I was still on Yvette’s desk crying and hyperventilating while a bunch of adults stared at me, waiting to hear what happened.

  Nobody asked Mr. Lutkenhouse for his version, and no one went after him when he turned around and walked away. By the time I had recovered sufficiently to talk, a cop and a doctor had shown up on the scene and a lawyer was on his way. The cop took down my story and the doctor checked for injuries. I had somehow made it through the ordeal with no visible signs of abuse, which was odd considering the shape Mr. Lutkenhouse was in. I couldn’t figure it out. I repeated the story for the lawyer, and he asked, “Did you hit him?”

  “I don’t remember hitting him. I mean, he was holding me by my neck. I was freaked out. If I did hit him, it wasn’t intentional,” I answered truthfully.

  “I’m sending you home for the rest of the day. We’ll call you in a little while and see how you’re doing,” the principal told me.

  On my way out, the cop was in the hallway studying a trail of blood that still hadn’t been cleaned up.

  twelve

  A reconstruction of confounding events, as our protagonist tries to escape the noble intentions of his friends and family

  WHERE ARE WE?” I asked, finding myself in a car speeding down the freeway. I couldn’t lift my head off the rear dash to see who was in the car, but I heard my mom’s voice.

  “Ory, is that you? Who’s the president?” she asked me.

  “What are you talking about? Clinton,” I said, having a vague memory of someone else asking me the same thing.

  “Good, it’s you. We’re in Berkeley.”

  “Almost at my house,” Kyle added from the driver’s seat of his Honda Civic. I still couldn’t lift my head, but I managed to turn it enough to see my mom’s boyfriend, John, sitting in the backseat next to me. “Welcome back,” he said. I tried to piece a narrative together, but nothing made any sense.

  The last thing I remembered was being in a hospital elevator with Jake, when one of the passengers started yelling and pointing frantically behind me. I turned around as the doors were closing, and saw that my IV bag was still out in the hall. As the elevator started going down, I man aged to rip the IV from my arm just in time to see it yanked up and out through the door. Jake had been taking me outside to smoke a cigarette, but I had no recollections beyond that. How the fuck did I end up in Berkeley, who did Mom think I was, and why could I feel the car upholstery rubbing against my bare ass? Nothing terrified me more in that moment than being naked in a car with my fully clothed family members. The fear gave me enough of a jolt to lift my head and get a more accurate picture of the situation.

  I saw that I was wearing a baby-blue hospital robe, but it was only a slight relief. I still felt naked, and vulnerable.

  “Jesus. What the fuck happened? Where are my clothes?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us what happened. The doctors had no idea what was wrong with you.”

  “What do you mean? Didn’t they run any tests on me?” I asked, trying to figure out how much they already knew. Then some of it started to come back to me.

  I had been in a hospital room with close to twenty people standing around my bed. A doctor was leaning over me.

  “Who’s the president?” he asked.

  “Clinton,” I said.

  “Okay, much better. Now can you tell me what day it is?”

  “Monday.”

  “Actually it’s Wednesday, but you seem to have come back to us. Good work. I’ll check back in a little while,” he said, leaving me to face the crowd of people. How did they all fit in this tiny room?

  My vision was so blurry I couldn’t tell who exactly was there with me, but I recognized Jibz’s voice.

  “Have you been using heroin again?” she asked.

  I tried to focus on her and found that I had been experiencing a serious case of double vision. What I had thought was twenty people merged into nine. I looked around to see Jibz, Jake, Aaron, Betsy, Eli and his girlfriend Beth, Kyle, Mom, and John.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told Jibz.

  “I found some needles in your room. Did you start using heroin again?”

  “Jesus Christ. What were you doing in my fucking room?” I tried to yell but didn’t have the energy.

  “Come on, Oran,” my mom said. “We’ve been here for three days now. I asked her to go see if she could find out what happened to you.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. You guys are fucking sick. Waiting around for three days so you could give me a fucking lecture? Where are my cigarettes?” I said, trying to sit up.

  “Hey, Ory. No one’s here to lecture you. We’ve all been worried sick. Who waits around a hospital for three days to judge someone?”

  I looked around at all the people judging me. “Exactly. Who does that? And what the fuck happened to my cigarettes? I need to get out of here.”

  “Are you crazy? You can’t leave,” Mom said.

  “Would someone at least get me a fucking cigarette!” I yelled.

  “Easy there, Cranberry,” Jake said. “Listen, let’s you and I go get a cigarette, and we’ll come back and figure out what to do next. Okay, buddy?” I nodded.

  Jake helped me out of bed, and we headed to the elevator with the IV rack in tow. But I couldn’t remember anything between then and waking up in Berkeley.

  “So are you going to tell us what happened?” Mom was asking me, as my awareness returned to being in Kyle’s car. “Was Jibz telling the truth? Have you been shooting heroin?”

  I was so ashamed that I couldn’t answer her. I just stared out the window at the other passing cars.

  “All of us have been waiting around at the hospital for three days wondering if you were ever going to come back to us. Now, come on, have you been doing heroin?” she pressed.

  “Goddamn! Yes, I’ve been doing heroin. I was trying to quit, and I fell out of my loft. Okay?”

  “Hey, man. She’s not trying to lay a trip on you, but come on…You’re her son and she’s just trying to figure out what’s going on so she can help,” John said.

  “We all are,” Kyle added.

  “Okay. So now you know. And what the hell happened to my clothes?” I asked again as Kyle veered off the freeway.

  “I don’t know. Aaron was trying to find your things, when Jake came running back to tell us you left the hospital,” Mom answered, giving up on the questioning.

  “We ended up driving all over the Mission looking for you,” John piped in.

  “What? Where could I have gone like this?” I asked, leaning over to get a visual confirmation that I wasn’t wearing any shoes either.

  “Oh, Ory. You should have seen it. We finally found you on Sixteenth Street with your ass hanging out of your robe, talking to a couple of drug dealers,” Mom said with a laugh.

  I couldn’t help but laugh with her. The whole idea was ludicrous. I couldn’t believe I managed to walk a whole mile dressed like this without getting picked up by the cops o
r somebody, and what the hell was I planning on buying the drugs with? My robe?

  “Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell was I doing?”

  “I have no idea, but those dealer guys were glad to see us. You were acting so crazy that they were more than happy to help us get you in the car.” She was still laughing.

  We were all laughing. What else was there to do?

  I MUST HAVE BLACKED out again, but this time only for a few minutes. When I came to, Kyle was laying out a sleeping bag for me in his basement recording studio. I looked around, trying to get my bearings, and asked, “What happened to Mom?”

  “Man, are you serious? You just said good-bye to her two minutes ago.”

  “Listen, Kyle. I’m totally sorry about all this.” I didn’t know what else to say to him.

  “Just go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.” He headed upstairs.

  “Hey, you got any clothes?” I called after him.

  “I already gave them to you. You put them on top of the records,” he called back.

  I looked around the room, which was filled with over ten thousand records. Kyle was a DJ and hip-hop producer. A few years earlier, when his collection had been half that size, Kyle and I drove across the country to Orlando, where he had enrolled in college. We loaded all of his records into a U-Haul trailer, which was so heavy it kept lifting the back tires of his Honda off the road. We took shifts driving eighty miles an hour the whole way, taking our only break in New Orleans on a Saturday morning. There wasn’t a whole lot going on that early, and after eating a bagel and cream cheese, we were back on the road. We ended up driving into Orlando exactly forty-eight hours after leaving Berkeley. He was going to school for audio engineering and had never lived on his own or taken a cross-country road trip. All he got to see was the shitty view from I-10 for two days. After going to a Walgreens to buy some dishes, utensils, and trash bags, he drove me to the airport. A few hours later I was on my way back home, wondering how I could be such an asshole to leave my little brother stranded in Florida all by himself. The trip could have been a great opportunity to try to make up for not being a very present older brother, but I didn’t manage to figure that out till I was on the plane going home.

  I found the clothes Kyle had laid out for me. After I changed out of my robe into a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, I lay down on the sleeping bag, feeling like a total asshole.

  I FELT LIKE EVEN more of an asshole the next morning when I walked up the stairs from Kyle’s recording studio. I was wearing a pair of his baggy hip-hop pants and a shirt that hung down to my knees, and my feet were crammed into a pair of Nikes a size and a half too small for me. Surprisingly, other than my scrunched-up feet, I felt pretty good physically. I just desperately wanted to get a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette before I got on BART to go home.

  “Hey, Kyle, you up?” He was obviously still asleep, but I couldn’t sit still.

  “Wha? Oh, hey. How you feeling?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “Surprisingly good,” I said. “Get up. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh man, I’m still sleeping.” But there was something odd about the way he said it. In fact, he seemed pretty wide-awake and alert for someone who had only been up for thirty seconds.

  “Okay, I’ll bring one back for you. I need a couple of bucks, though.” Whatever few dollars I had were left at the hospital.

  “I can’t let you go,” he said nervously, getting out of bed. “Mom told me I had to keep you here.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? I’m only walking two blocks to Peet’s. You can come with me, but you can’t stop me from going.”

  “Sorry, Mom said I can’t let you leave.”

  What the fuck did she have to do with it? I was grateful to Kyle and everyone for finding me last night, but I was fine now, and I wanted to go home.

  “What are you gonna do? Tie me to a chair?” I started walking down the stairs to the front door.

  He threw up his arms but made no attempt to come after me. The door was locked from both sides with a deadbolt that you needed a key to open.

  I felt bad for Kyle, but there was no way I was going to let him lock me up in his apartment. Going back upstairs, I told him, “Listen. I don’t want to get you in trouble with Mom, but you can either let me out through the door and tell her I climbed out the window, or I can just go ahead and climb out the window.”

  “Man,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not letting you out of the door or the window.”

  “Okay,” I said, opening the window and climbing out without even looking to see if I could make it down.

  Kyle was instantly on the phone with Mom, and I realized after I got outside that there was nowhere for me to go, and it was about a fifteen-foot drop down to the sidewalk. But instead of going back inside, I held on to the window frame and watched Kyle defend himself on the phone.

  “There’s nothing I can do, Mom. He’s hanging off the side of the building.” He rolled his eyes at me, which was our code for Mom being on one of her rants that no one could defend themselves against.

  “She’s calling the police,” he said, hanging up the phone.

  “The police? What are they going to do?” I asked, still holding on to the windowsill.

  “Man, I don’t fucking know,” he said, exasperated by the whole situation. Kyle sat down and took a deep breath, I repositioned myself on the windowsill, and we waited for the police to show up.

  HEY! YOU okay up there? What’s going on?” A cop yelled up at me from the sidewalk, as another stepped out of the car. It couldn’t have taken them more than five minutes to show up.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just trying to get out of the house. My brother’s got me locked in,” I answered.

  “Okay. I want you to go back inside and tell your brother we want to talk to him.” The other cop walked to the door and started pounding on it.

  “This is the police! Open up!” he started yelling.

  Kyle shook his head and started for the stairs, while I climbed back in through the window and followed him down.

  They asked both of us to come outside, where they separated us to figure out what the hell was going on. I couldn’t hear what Kyle was saying, but I told my cop everything that had happened from the hospital till they showed up.

  “Okay. So you weren’t trying to hurt or kill yourself?” he asked me after I told him my story.

  “No. I just wanted a cup of coffee.”

  “Stay here for a minute,” he said before walking over to Kyle. This time I could hear every word because the cop started screaming at him. “Being a drug addict is not illegal, but kidnapping is one of the most serious crimes in the state of California!”

  Both of the cops looked as if they were ready to tackle Kyle to the ground. Returning to his normal voice, the cop, who had just a moment ago looked like a rabid dog, asked calmly if I wanted to press charges against my brother. It was a strange feeling of power knowing that if I said yes, Kyle would be handcuffed and thrown in the back of the car for trying to help me out in the only way he knew how.

  “Jesus. All I want is a fucking cup of coffee,” I said.

  The cops relaxed, got back in their car, and drove away.

  “Hey, Kyle, you got a couple of bucks, man?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go,” he said, and we started walking to the café.

  I HAD NO IDEA what they had given me at the hospital. Mom told me they hadn’t found any drugs in my system and had even taken a spinal tap in a last-ditch effort to figure out what was wrong. Whatever medication they had given me was wearing off quickly. I didn’t feel sick so much as tired, and my back and rib cage were starting to kill me.

  Kyle bought me a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, but he refused to give me any money. I had to jump the turnstile to catch BART back to the city. I thought about going back to the hospital to get my wallet, but fatigue won over and I decided to go home and take a nap instead. Fortunately, my stuff
was already in my room in a clear plastic bag. Going through the bag to get my wallet, I was disappointed to find that my favorite Pendleton shirt had been cut off with a pair of scissors, only an inch away from the buttons.

  Under the shirt, I found a picture of me in a straitjacket, smiling straight at the camera with half of my beard shaved. Confused, I reached up to feel my face, and sure enough, one side of my beard felt noticeably longer than the other. Why hadn’t anyone—Jake, Mom, Kyle, John, the police—told me that I was walking around with half a beard?

  My back was now hurting so much that I decided to put off the nap and get high one more time. Too embarrassed to even buy drugs looking like this, I cleaned myself up and went out to score. That image of me smiling at the camera like a crazy person was still bothering the shit out of me. Luckily no one had been home to see me when I walked in, but who the fuck had taken that picture? I pondered it while I got high, then climbed up to my bed to doze off.

  CONFUSED, ANGRY, and tired, I woke up for the second time in two days to a room full of people, but this time it was my room. I was up on my loft, so I couldn’t see exactly who was there, but it sounded as if a convention were going on below me. Fucking assholes. Didn’t they know I had no capacity to defend myself when I was waking up?

  “Hey, Oran. Wake up.” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “It’s Jack, your father. We need to talk.”

  I sat up and looked down over the ledge to see Jack, Kyle, Mom, Jibz, Jake, Betsy, and the rest of my roommates staring up at me.

  “Jesus fucking Christ. What are you doing here?” I said specifically to Jack. “Please…all of you, get the fuck out of my room…and stop digging around in there,” I yelled at Jibz, who was methodically poking around in my trash can. She didn’t listen to me. Luckily I had hidden the remainder of my dope in the back of my desk drawer.