The Cake is a Lie

by mcdavis3

  The next morning wasn’t like after the other bad trips, where I immediately felt somewhat better, overjoyed to be given a second chance. There was no place for celebration with this one. It took a month for the taint to ease, to get back into a groove. That was the last time I ever snorted anything. You couldn’t pay me enough to do it again.

  32. Casey Something (Summer, 2006)

  With a week left in the school year most of the seniors weren’t around campus anymore, their great railing was as deserted as a ski resort in summer. A few of us had gathered around the relic to try and recreate the magic. I was doing my best Loren impression, leaning back into the air with my feet tangled through the bars for support. The group assembled around me was a travesty. My best friends had all dropped out. The railing was now a hodge-podge circle of skaters and sophomore hard-druggies. Sophomores!

  The nerve on these kids, I thought. They’re not even saying anything, they’re just standing around nervously. I wasn’t saying anything either, I never had anything to talk about with the skaters. Did you guys see that hot new skate video?

  While I was contemplating the possibility of a whole year of this, a 300 dollar blonde hairdo entered the courtyard. Casey something, a senior who transferred last year. When I saw her around campus it never felt right. She was acquaintances with the most popular kids, but even amongst them she stood out like a whale in a fish tank. Her hair was just too nice, her clothes too mature, she looked like a 24 year old. It was why I never bothered to learn her last name.

  Casey was walking directly at us. Is she coming over to us? Why is she alone?

  As she got closer I lost track of her in my peripheral vision. Then I felt a hand crawl up around my back.

  “Hey big boys.”

  I didn’t even look over my shoulder, I could tell by the stone look on a skater, Ross’ face, it was her.

  “We were just talking about skipping 5th to blow a blunt,” Ross lied invitingly. “What’s up with you?”

  “Oh I’m good, I’m just walking and talking.” While I tensed up like a statue her finger started making circles around the back of my shoulder. Something was clearly up, but I didn’t stop her. I wasn’t going to feel her up back, but I wasn’t not going to stop her.

  “You smell nice,” Casey said with what I assumed was sarcasm because I just smoked a cigarette.

  “Are you going to 5th?” I asked, finally turning to her. Her well-trained eyes responded attentively.

  “I need to go to my academic advisor, but I’m lost.”

  “It’s by the office.” Ross pointed down the hall.

  “They transferred over my credits wrong, can you believe that? They’re trying to say I can’t graduate.” She paused, but none of us jumped in fast enough, “Sure I’m not an A student, but I get B’s and C’s. I handle my shit, I’ve never failed a class.”

  “That’s bunk,” Ross replied characteristically.

  “Ok I’ve failed one class.” She blurted out. This got a big laugh from everyone. “Physics, but that doesn’t count, that teacher was a creep. He hit on me, I swear. I even got it taken off my record.”

  Right as my fantasies really got going Casey pulled her unreciprocated arm away from my body and jumped over to hold Ross. In-between she suspiciously stumbled for a second before grabbing onto him. She reached behind his neck and pulled out the tag of his shirt, “Where was your shirt made? Heaven?”

  “What are you on?” I interjected laughing.

  “I’m not on anything.” She answered annoyed. “Well… I was feeling under the weather so I took this flu medicine.”

  “Oh ya, ‘flu medicine,’” I kid. The bell rang and everyone walked off except Casey and the two of us she’d grabbed.

  “I swear, I’m not on anything.” She declared again once the hallway died down, this time suspiciously unprompted.

  “How much flu medicine did you take?” I asked. Maybe she is robotripping? Robotripping was a fad of drinking robotussin that had hit a few months ago. Eric, Jay, Jon, Jeff and, Nate had all done it.

  “I don’t know…” She said.

  Ross and I both looked at each other seriously. “Do you need help?”

  “I need to go to the academic advisor.”

  “I don’t think you should go to the academic advisor right now.”

  “Well, then I want to go home. Will one of you take me home?”

  “I’ll take her,” I volunteered faster than a saint.

  “I better help,” Ross added. As we headed for my car Casey started walking off kilter, laughing as she ran into garbage cans. Ross and I worked together to hold her between us and keep her on track.

  Casey lived in a nice area, in a rambler amongst three story houses. After she opened her door she ran inside, leaving Ross and I standing hesitantly outside. By the time we decided we to step in and follow her she’d returned holding a big framed picture. The picture was of an older man in a pilot’s uniform kissing another man on the cheek.

  “Before you even ask, or get to looking at this picture and start wondering, this is my dad.” She pointed to the pilot. “He’s gay. If you got anything to say about it you can get the fuck out. I love my dad more than anything. Seriously, if that’s a problem, let’s do this right now.” She put a fist in the air and gave us a dirty look as we laughed at her. It was impossible to tell if she was being serious or making jokes.

  “As you can see, he’s also a pilot. He’s gone for weeks at a time, right now he’s in the Philippines.” She ran off back into the house.

  Cautiously, I walked in and took a seat on the edge of a leather couch. The clothes laying all over the very well-kept house suggested she’d had the place to herself for a bit. Ross threw himself on a loveseat with a pile clothes on it.

  “Have you guys ever seen a fake ID before?” She yelled from a room down the hallway.

  “You have a fake ID?”

  Footsteps scurried down the wood floor hallway until Casey appeared barefoot and shirtless. She was halfway through changing, in only a black bra and jeans, holding a wallet that she tossed at me. Tingles ran down my back like a hot liquid.

  “Okay you guys have to be honest, do you like this bra? I got it in New York. Is the bow stupid?” She pointed at the puffy dangling bow in the middle. I raised my palm up as a blinder to politely half block her from my vision.

  “You already know its bomb,” Ross complimented.

  “It’s the nicest bra I’ve seen,” I said. The big bow was definitely stupid.

  She didn’t seem satisfied and started modeling herself in front of a mirror on the wall. I pretend to be interested in the fake ID for a second before tossing it over to Ross.

  “You go out to clubs?”

  “All the time,” she answered as she headed back down the hallway. “I meet all kinds of guys out, doctors and lawyers, they buy me stuff. I met a surgeon last week.” The hope I’d been holding onto of seducing her was thrown away with the comment. Ross and I made funny faces at each other until she reappeared again in pajamas.

  “I was feeling really sick so I bought these this morning.” She threw a bottle of flu medication over to Ross as she walked past us into the kitchen. “You guys want some cookies?”

  He unscrewed the top and turned over the bottle to show me it was empty.

  “You ate the whole bottle?” I asked alarmingly. She came back and settled on a sofa with an unopened cookie box.

  “I guess”

  “Why?”

  “I felt sick, I feel better now.”

  “You tried to kill yourself?” She was silent.

  “Do you know how good your life is?” This was the opening to one of my favorite spiels.

  No response.

  “Twenty thousand children die a day from poverty. Even more have their growth stunted from malnutrition. A 1.5 billion people can’t read or write. Billions without sanitation, clean water. You can shower, go to the bathroom, you sleep on pillows, and you’ve never known hunger or th
e cold.” I recalled the last time I gave this speech, in social psych, right before volunteering to eat some dog food for a class experiment.

  Casey had her gaze buried in the cookie box nutritional information.

  “And you’re beautiful.”

  This got a reaction from her. “Oh really? How beautiful?”

  “More beautiful than you’ll never know.” She smiled faintly but still looked unsatisfied, as if what she really wanted me to tell her was that she was short and her jaw was kind of boney. “You could be blind,” I continued, “You can see, what a gift is it to see, to hear, to touch.” I ran my fingers along the clingy leather texture of the couch.

  The smile turned back into a frown. “Are you happy?” She asked. “You look happy.”

  “I am happy. And you should be to. Billions of people can’t even imagine how good it is to be you.”

  We sat with her as she fell asleep, curled up with her unopened cookie box.

  On the way home I ruminated deeply, unable to imagine Casey’s unhappiness. To be living in paradise and not be able to enjoy it. Why couldn’t she see how lucky she was? We all had problems.

  From my car console I pulled out my cigarette case. Throughout the day I looked inside it. Half the case was lined with 10 soft, immaculately rolled cigarettes squeezed together by a lighter. A perfectly rolled up bag of chronic was fit neatly into the other half of the box. Everything I need was there, organized perfectly inside the little case.

  I’d quit e and coke forever. I’d quit hallucinogens forever after being chased by dagger wielding snake men and dragons. I’d quit painkillers and morphine after getting dope sick. But, overall, the last four years had been pure happiness, I was truly happy, and weed had been with me the whole way. Instant and fool proof gratification.

  Running my finger along the evenness of the packed cigarettes butts I looked up to the sky and proudly begrudged god. Is that all you got? It doesn’t matter what else happens to me, do your worst. I’ll be fine as long as I have my weed and cigarettes.

  I saw Casey in passing at a graduation event a week later. She smiled but we were never seen talking again.

  Part 4.

  33. We Cannot Hold (Summer, 2006)

  I woke up on a sunny morning at summer camp. I was extra groggy and gross as usual, but one of my first thoughts happily popped me out of bed and led me into the woods, giddy with anticipation. The first bowl of the day was always the best. Every hit after that only made you more tired. I’d be sleepwalking by 3, asleep by 7.

  The first tickle of smoke trickling into my lungs caused me to vomit a waterfall of cheese blintzes and tacos. Leaving me stunned, burping up puffs of smoke and chunks of food. I didn’t feel like I had a flu, my stomach just hurt like crazy. I went to lay down in the nurse’s office. Bedridden with stabbing bloatedness, I didn’t smoke the rest of the day. Or the next.

  On the third day, back at home and feeling a little better, I decided to ease back into it and invited a few friends over to watch a movie and get high. After two puffs I threw up three times all over the floor and became positive that the weed was laced with chemicals and was a bad mix.

  I quickly rushed my friends out of the house, “Sorry guys I have the flu, plus I got rush to go visit my mom in the hospital, her condition’s getting worst.” I only felt some relief after the ambulance paramedics checked me out and assured me I was fine. The next day I bought a bag of weed from my most trusted source. After all that I just had to get high and relax. I told him that there was some laced weed going around and he promised me his stuff was all natural.

  After a puff I ended up forcing my friend to take me to the emergency room.

  It was something with my stomach I told the doctor. Cancer, or a parasite from my trip to Mexico, from that feces infested river water. I envisioned a five feet long worm that’d been growing inside me for over a year, eating my organs. They checked me out and said I was fine, to come back if something new came up. Two days later I threw up three glasses of champagne at my dad’s wedding. I forced my brother to take me to the ER.

  This time I said something right because they scheduled me for an endoscopy the next day. I was thrilled the doctors were finally going to do something. I knew my body, I knew when something was wrong. My mom’s tumor grew in her stomach for over a year, by the time it was discovered it was the size of loaf of bread. That wasn’t going to happen to me.

  When my dad and I met with the doctor after the operation he delivered me the awful news, they didn’t find anything.

  He looked me in the eye and said, “Marco, I think you’ve been having panic attacks, that’s what’s making you throw up.” He recommended I see a psychiatrist and a therapist.

  On the way home my dad told me about how anxiety and panic runs in my family. How my mom had debilitating panic attacks during law school. How my uncle lost his big modeling career because of panic. How my aunt was too afraid to drive. I half listened, mainly thinking about how I couldn’t smoke pot or drink anymore. That was what kept making me throw up. Up until that point it had never crossed my mind that I might not soon be back my no-stress buddha blowing lifestyle.

  When we got to my dad’s house he put on my favorite T.V. show to cheer me up. It might as well have been in another language. Anxiety is all the discomfort of suffocation, my brain had just refused to stop working correctly. An infinite future of this loomed over me. I began to cry uncontrollably. My step mom exited the room to give my dad and me some privacy as he held me.

  I decided to hide away at my dad’s for the rest of the summer and stop returning calls. The transition to sober life wasn’t smooth. Smoking weed was my whole identity, no worries. I was still convinced I had some unknown illness. Certain I was going to die in my sleep I’d fight to keep my eyes open every night. But words like “cancer,” “insanity” and “death” cannot express the totality of fear you feel when the wholeness of your existence is in danger.

  I experienced all kinds of new agonies for the first time. I lost my appetite and stopped eating.

  I wasn’t stupid, I immediately ran with the theory that my drug use caused this. Faced with a mood catastrophe, the resemblances of memories from frying balls on a bunch of drugs at 15 aren’t hard to find. I could feel the brain damage just thinking about it. My developing brain had just taken one too many punches to the head. I completely turned on my old self, all drugs, and built a fortress of regret to rule from.

  That was when some really weird things started happening. I became afraid of touching public places, to avoid the one in fifty million chance that I might get a contact high from someone on drugs who touched the same place. I started only drinking bottled water, afraid that there was a one in three hundred million chance someone put LSD in my drink. It was safer to not take the risk. I devoted most of my thoughts to thinking of any possible way I might get drugged and did everything in my power to avoid those situations. I stopped shaking hands and held my breathe when I passed by homeless people.

  The therapist taught me breathing exercises. “In 1, 2, 3. Out 1, 2, 3.” She also kept recommending I see a psychiatrist and start a medication but I adamantly resist. Drugs had caused all this and the last thing I was going to do was take more drugs, especially from the big pharmaceutical corporations. But as the start of senior year, and the thought of facing people, drew closer, I waivered.

  I told the Psychiatrist I didn’t want to do drugs. That drugs caused this.

  “Marco, anti-depressants for anxiety and depression is like insulin for diabetics. There’s absolutely no evidence that anti-depressants are bad for you. In fact, all the evidence shows that untreated depression will shrink your Frontal Cortex and Hypothalamus, affecting your mood and memory even more. See the problem is your Accumbens are underactive right now.” He even had a diagram. I started the medication and it helped, although I wasn’t sure why, I couldn’t really feel it like the other drugs. The thought of the doctor and his diagram was very comforting. I starte
d eating again, having less panic attacks.

  Miraculously, my mom got out of the hospital for the start of the school year. She’d been very sick in the hospital all summer.

  Her doctor told her the big news, “Based on your last round of tests you should go home, Barbara, it’d be good for you.” My mom and Allan jubilantly picked me up from my dad’s on their way home.

  For the last month of her life my mom and I made quite the pair. Her on the couch, in-between life and death, watching public television and old musicals. Me on an inflatable camping mattress by her side, terrorized by my thoughts, breathing, working on a letter to Oprah to help us.

  She wasn’t herself. She wasn’t coherent. She’d drift in and out of consciousness, waking up frantically to scream that she was dying. When the seizures started I worked to keep her head still. The ambulance came and took her away for the last time.

  I’d prayed for her to die, days before even. But when it happened, I was shocked. She’d beaten death so many times I’d stopped believing it could actually happen, everyone had. Losing a parent you love isn’t hardest on the first day. The hardest part is later, when you have dreams about her decomposing body coming home from the grave like nothing had happened. When you never get to introduce a new girlfriend to your famously picky mom. Not being able to get her advice when you tell her you want to invest a year and a half of your life writing a book about a girl you used to know. On the positive side, an angel’s always got your back.

  34. The Deep-Down Freudian Reason I Will Never be Able to Enjoy Doing Drugs Again

  When I was younger my mom and I would always go to a pumpkin patch every year for Halloween. It was our thing. I’d pet the animals and play in the hay barns, my mom would watch with delight and take pictures. I always wanted Carlo to come but he was older and too cool.