by Nico Walker
They’d all said they were good on pancakes. Only Zoë had said she wanted to go. So I went with her and we were just going to have pancakes and maybe I was in love with Zoë but that had nothing to do with it. And maybe I was glad that it was just her who had gone, but I hadn’t fixed it that way on purpose. Roy though, he didn’t tell Emily anything like that. He made it sound like it had been some kind of clandestine pancakes date, and Emily got super fucking pissed at me. I came home and she threw a glass against the wall and said, “How’d you like your fucking pancakes?”
No shit. That was the end. A few days later Emily was gone. She took her stuff with her: the accent pillows, the Crock-Pot, all of it. I didn’t try to stop her; she was better off the way she was going, and I was sick of her.
Zoë turned 18 but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t fuck for anything. I’d been gutted. I thought a lot about Emily and her lovers: the Puerto Rican with the Valiums, the wildlife photographer from France, Dave from the Giant Eagle. Those were just the ones I knew about. I wondered what they’d done with her, if they’d made her come. Had they cared about her or had they just fucked her? Had she done stuff for them that she wouldn’t do with me? Had she talked about me? Had she told them I deserved it?
I more or less stopped going to school. School was too goddamn much. I felt like I knew too much already. I’d seen the end of the movie. The only thing school was good for was it got me out of two weeks of summer training with the National Guard. I’d said, I can’t go. I’m signed up for school. I’m paying for it out of pocket. They’d said, We do this every summer. I’d said I hadn’t known. They’d said, Everyone knows. I’d said, You should have said something. And goddamn if I hadn’t known what I was doing but there was no way in hell I was going to hang out in the woods for two weeks and play soldiers with a lot of off-duty sheriff’s deputies. I had more important things to do.
I’d stay up by myself in the early morning and snort cocaine and snort Oxy. A gram here. 40mg there. Another 40mg. I’d steal Wi-Fi from my neighbors and watch porn on the Internet. I’d write poetry. I’d drink vodka. Vodka was good because I could drink it all day and I didn’t shit blood. I imagined all the porno girls were war widows and it made me sad. I’d get on the vodka and snort some powder at my little table and write five or six poems between three o’clock and nine in the morning—poems mainly about true love being impossible, poems mainly about what drugs I liked to do, poems mainly about barely legal girls getting down on some cocks, poems mainly about what a piece of shit death was. Then I’d go to bed. I sent a few poems to The New Yorker, but they didn’t make it in. Then my laptop crashed and I lost my poems.
* * *
—
I HAD to take James Lightfoot to the police station in Linndale. James Lightfoot was a good guy but he was also fucked in the head. I don’t know the details of exactly why or how he was fucked in the head or if there were any such exact details. Probably he was just born fucked in the head. And I guess I’d been born that way too and it was only a coincidence that I had been to a war and the war probably hadn’t had much to do at all with my being fucked in the head. Anyway James Lightfoot wasn’t a happy person because people treated him like shit because he was almost normal but then he wasn’t and he had a lazy eye and he was real skinny like you knew he couldn’t ever fight and what all he had was just the things that no one gave a fuck to take from him.
He had to pay off a warrant and I had to take the money in and pay it off because there were other warrants out for him and if he went into the police station they’d arrest him. I snorted some coke before I left my apartment and I picked up James Lightfoot and we drove to Linndale. I hadn’t ever been to Linndale before. It was the first I’d heard of it. We got to the police station and James Lightfoot gave me the money to pay the warrant off with and I went inside. I told the policeman behind the glass that I was there to pay James Lightfoot’s warrant off, and he said he needed to see my ID. So I gave him my ID and when he took it he went back somewhere in the office and I looked down at my hand and there was coke all over my hand from where I’d touched the driver’s license. I was embarrassed and not a little worried but I stayed because if I left I was fucked anyway and then the policeman came back and he didn’t even mention the coke on my driver’s license. So I was alright and the warrant was paid off like that.
We drove back to the East Side, and James Lightfoot wanted to sign some of his paychecks over to me so I could give him the equivalent in cash for them since he couldn’t have a bank account because he was in ChexSystems and his credit was totally fucked. We went to the bank and the teller wouldn’t let me deposit the checks James Lightfoot had signed over to me, even though he was right there and he had his passport and I had enough money in my account to cover the checks. The bank people thought we were undesirables. So we got nothing and we left. I drove James Lightfoot to James Lightfoot’s mom’s house and I got on the phone and called the bank’s eight-hundred number and told them that I was a war veteran and that the teller and the manager at the Warrensville branch had treated me like I was an undesirable and that I didn’t know what I was going to do yet but it sure as fuck wasn’t right the way they treated people. And I got off the phone. I was in the driveway and the summer burned my eyes and everything had changed and nothing had changed.
* * *
—
ZOË WOULD come around and spend time with me some days. We’d go to ’80s night together every Sunday. I guess she liked me despite my being a lame fuck. That or she liked cocaine. Maybe it was a little of both. She really was good though. She played the cello and she’d gone to school for that. And she could speak all these different languages. She would speak French and I liked the way she did the r’s. I’d ask her to do the r’s and she would. Then I’d try but I couldn’t do them for shit and she thought that was funny. I tried to snort a line of coke off her stomach, but there was no air-conditioning and her skin was dewing so it didn’t work and I licked it off her.
We went to the lake. She drove. She had a little white Volkswagen. I couldn’t drive it because it was a stick. She ran all the stop signs. This was some kind of matter of principle with her evidently; I don’t know what specifically but she hardly ever stopped for them.
We got to the lakeshore and we were wearing our bathing suits. She looked real good in hers. She had the whole flawless complexion thing going for her. She was like a girl in a magazine. She looked good in the sunlight whereas I looked bad. I hadn’t been getting out much in the daytime and I was very pale. You could see the marks all over from where the sand fleas had been at me the summer before, when I’d been out in the marshes and the shit canals and all that. I hadn’t been eating much of late either, and I had the cocaine physique. And there were the cigarette burns too, as the tendency in those days was to burn myself with cigarettes whenever I got down in the dumps. All in all I was another stray dog with the mange.
Many dead fish were washed up on the lakeshore. They were all around us on the sand in their various phases of decomposing. But this was how it always was at the lakeshore. The lake smelled like gasoline. We went in the water and we swam around some. We kissed. After a while we drove back. And suddenly it was as if she didn’t like me, as if she hadn’t ever liked me at all. She’d do that from time to time; she’d just change her mind about me. It made me feel like shit; but then I’d say to myself, You totally deserve this.
She was supposed to fly back to Barcelona at the end of August. I’d always known that. That had been what was supposed to happen when I first met her. But I hadn’t thought it was possible that I’d live to see it happen. Then it happened. Before she left she gave me a letter. The letter said: “Wait.”
She waited two days.
I waited three days.
* * *
—
OTHER GIRLS. Some girls I didn’t deserve. Some girls I deserved. One thing: I was alwa
ys an asshole.
When I was gonna kill myself I went to the VA hospital. I waited in the waiting room. There were two other people there. Elderly. A man and woman. The man had an oxygen tank and one of those hats that tells you what battleship he was on. The woman—his wife, I imagine—looked like a potato that was about to whistle a tune. A happy tune. When it was my turn I told the hospital people that I was real close to doing it but I didn’t believe in it and now I didn’t know what to do. They said hang out here and they sent me back to the waiting room except to a different part that was boxed in with Plexiglas and they shut the door and I sat there for a while, away from the other people. Then a lady came and asked me if I wanted to be an inpatient and already I knew that’d be bad so I said I’d just leave. She said she’d make an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist in a few days. I said alright.
That Saturday the National Guard sent people to my apartment to come get me. I had my mind made up that I was through with the fake soldier bullshit. I followed them down to the armory and told the one guy I’d try from now on because I was on the spot and I had to say some shit like that even though I knew I wasn’t gonna try and I didn’t. After a while they lost interest, so I was free because I was more trouble than I was worth.
When I ran out of money that winter I had to go get a job. I worked at a restaurant again. Six nights a week and it paid shit. Girls left me alone for a little while.
And then it was spring again. And then it was summer again. Spring was like a foot in the grave. Summer was a fucking joke. I’d turned 23. James Lightfoot went to rehab. I moved to Belmar. Belmar was alright till the ceiling got wet and fell in. I called the landlord and said the ceiling had got wet and fallen in. He sent a guy who put in a drop ceiling. When the drop ceiling got wet and fell in I knew it was time for a change. I quit my job. I left everything. I left the furniture. Actually I threw it into the yard. I threw it off the porch from the second story. All I took when I moved was the bed and a rug I liked.
I was into heroin. I had sold my TV and injected it. I’d found a decent enough heroin guy: Three-Hundred. This was before Three-Hundred was a piece of shit. I moved into a one-bedroom above the sandwich shop at Coventry and Mayfield, next to the convenience store where they had wine. The sandwiches were excellent. Things were good. It was fall. I liked fall. I was completely fucking broke and the world’s economy was in crisis. It looked like maybe the world would stop and then we’d be okay. No more pretending. I went to ’80s night for the fuck of it. This is when I met Libby.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
It was a lot of those little tea candles everywhere because the electric wasn’t on yet, and Libby and I did some lines. We were drinking Gato Negro—the cheapest shit you could get for money—and she was talking softly because she wasn’t sure of herself; she said she was wasting her time at community college:
“But my cousin lives in California. I’m going to move there and live with her….She works for a movie studio in Hollywood….She tells me lots of inside stuff about celebrities, stuff the public doesn’t know about, like George Clooney’s actually gay….Yeah. But he doesn’t come out because it’d be bad for business….I’ll probably live with my cousin at first. She says she can get me a job.”
I said I’d miss her. She looked down into her cup. She wore lots of mascara. Her mother had died when she was in high school. I never asked how.
I said, “I don’t think it’d be possible for you to be any hotter than you are. You’re as hot as girls get. You’re as hot as it’s possible to be.”
She said, “Thank you.”
And when she was naked, she was on all fours, and I spit on her back.
She said, “Did you just spit on me?”
“Yeah.”
“You do whatever you want, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“I think it’s a good thing.”
* * *
—
NEXT NIGHT we went to a Halloween party across town in Tremont. She had brought two friends with her: Gilda and Megan. Megan was the only one wearing a costume. She had dressed up as a Nazi. I’d said I wasn’t sure she’d be well received at the party if she went dressed up like that. But Gilda had said she was Jewish and Megan’s costume didn’t offend her so Megan would probably be okay. We did some lines and went to the party. Gilda met Roy there and Gilda left the party early with Roy. Then a girl named Jael got mad at Megan’s costume. She said her grandparents had been in the camps. Megan took the swastika armband off her sleeve, but she still had the jackboots and the brown shirt on and nothing to change into. So we left. We went back to my apartment and there was no more coke and Megan wasn’t feeling it. She said, “Take me home, Libby.”
“Let’s just stay a little while.”
“I want to go home,” she said. “I want to go home NOW, Libby!”
“Jeez. Okay. We’ll go. Just give me one second, will ya?”
Libby asked when she could see me again.
I said as soon as she possibly could would be best for me.
She said tomorrow.
I said tomorrow.
* * *
—
LIBBY HAD angel wings done on her back. On some places on the angel wings were names written in small script. “They’re the names of people I love,” she said.
She’d lie on her back and with her head over the side of the bed. She said she liked this. She went: lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky…
She was 19.
These girls had grown up with the Internet.
I came in her face.
Libby wiped the come off her face and licked it off her fingers; and she said, “The monkeys are eating cawwits and the wabbits are eating bananas!”
And I was depressed again.
* * *
—
I HAD money on Friday so I bought some heroin and shot it with Libby and Gilda.
Gilda said, “Oh, my. This is nice.”
Libby said, “Yeah, this is really great.”
Roy came over and shot heroin too. We all drank Gato Negro. We smoked all the cigarettes.
Gilda looked like Tinker Bell when she was wasted.
I wanted to fuck Gilda.
She spilled half a bottle of Gato Negro on the rug.
She said, “How careless of me.”
I said, “No worries, Gilda. You’ll have that.”
When we ran out of cigarettes Roy took Gilda home and Libby and I crashed but we couldn’t sleep. So we got up and we went and took a shower. That’s how I saw Libby without her makeup on. She looked so young it scared the shit out of me and I told her I loved her and she got real happy about it. She said she loved me too. This was the happiest that I would ever see her. And I already knew it would turn out bad because I was a fucking coward and my heart was rotten as shit.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Gilda was fucking Roy. She was also fucking an Israeli guy named Ricky. Ricky wore a leather jacket but he wasn’t shit. Libby told me about Ricky but I knew him from before and I knew he wasn’t shit. He was one of these ones that everything he says is a lie and he goes around telling girls he’s 27 when he’s more like 40. And he wore a leather jacket. And he wasn’t shit. One night Gilda and Roy and Libby and I went out to a bar and Ricky came around and it looked like there maybe was going to be some violence.
Ricky said to me, “Why does your boy keep looking at me like that? He needs to stop doing it. I’ll hurt him, bro. I was in the Israeli army.”
Roy was a fuck and I knew that. I’d seen him steal tramadols from a border collie with terminal cancer. But we went back a long way, and I was obliged to do whatever was necessary. There was that, plus Ricky was a bitch, and I didn’t believe that shit he said about Israel.
I said to Ricky, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll beat the fuck out of you.”
He said, “I’m not trying to start any shit with you, bro. I’m just saying that your boy should be more careful.”
“Nobody wants you here.”
“Fuck you, bro,” he said. “Who the fuck are you? You’re a fucking creep, bro. I know you’re getting those girls strung out on drugs. You’re scum!”
He had his mind made up that he wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe he was the chaperone. Who can know what’s in a man’s heart. Anyway the rest of us said fuck it and we went back to my apartment and we were locked out so I kicked the door in and then we shot heroin and did stuff like that. It got late and Gilda spilled wine on the rug again.
She said, “I’m so clumsy.”
I said, “Don’t worry about it, Gilda. You’re alright. But please be careful. I like this rug.”
Roy said it was the party rug.
This was the night I said to Libby I thought we ought to get married. And she agreed that we ought to get married. So we were getting married. We told Gilda and Roy. Gilda said, “How lovely! I’ll be the flower girl!”
Later I tried to fuck Libby but I couldn’t get it up because I was on too much drugs.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I had quit my job that past summer. The job had paid eight dollars an hour. It had cost me almost that much in parking tickets. It was a lot of fucks who worked there anyway. Actually everyone who worked there was a fuck. Except Joe. Joe worked there and he was alright. The rest of them were shit. They’d tell on you to the boss. They didn’t do drugs. I think a lot of them were virgins. No one but Joe and I had ever had anything to do with murders or anything like that. The world meant something else to them than it did to me.
After he got back, Joe had had problems for a while. But he was getting better. He had stopped jumping out of moving cars every time he had a fight with his girlfriend when he was drunk and they were in a car. So that was progress. Soon he would be a decent human being again. We wouldn’t be friends much longer.