Gus

by Chanchal

Normally, when I snapped at him he would just begin to ignore me, to pretend I wasn’t there.

  “Because it’ll keep you alive?” I respond briskly with the only answer that I think makes sense. However, Gus is able to shoot it down with no hesitation.

  “And if I don’t want to be alive anymore?” I look down. I hadn’t expected that answer. It makes sense. I understand why Gus wants to die. His life is crap. Still, I can’t let him give up. I am the only one that can help him. I have to keep fighting for him.

  “And your dad, your sister, do you want them to stay alive?” I attack the one thing he cares about.

  “When I’m dead, I won’t have to fucking care about them anymore.” Again, he has the perfect rebuttal to my words. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I know that at least part of him believes it. Part of me believes it. Not just believes, fears.

  “You can’t think like that.” I’m out of logic now and say the only thing I can.

  “Why not?” He says with another flawless rebuttal.

  “I’m staying with you.” I tell him. I have no more arguments to make. “I’m not leaving you alone until I see you’re feeling better.”

  And so, I stay with Gus, nagging him every chance that I get. I am with him as he tries to sit down at down at his desk and go through the bills that have piled up as he’s neglected his work. I am with him as he becomes increasingly irritated by his lack of focus as he fails to manage the bills correctly. I am with him as he becomes so mad that he flings himself backwards onto the ground and knocks all of the papers on his desk into the air, scattering them everywhere. I am with him as he listens to his music, irritatedly tapping the table and unable to maintain even a simple beat. I am with him as he looks up at his calendar, eyes teetering with exhaustion, and cries as he realizes that once again he is unable to add an X. I am with him as he lays down on the cold, hard floor, still crying, and finally falls asleep. I am with him as he sleeps and his nightmares overtake him, causing him to sweat, toss, turn, and scream. I am still with him four hours later when he wakes up for work, still exhausted.

  After Gus wakes up, the first thing he does is go to the shower, trying to get the stench of weed out before he leaves for his job. Unfortunately for him, it’s to strong and he doesn’t have enough time nor does his shower have strong enough water pressure to totally get rid of the telling smell. For a short while, Gus considers calling in sick, but I tell him that he has already missed three days this week and would certainly risk getting fired if he missed another. In the end, the boy agrees that the best course of action is to just go to work and hope that his boss doesn’t notice.

  Being only fifteen, Gus doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for work. Even as his life spirals into a deeper and darker hole, the boy is still self-aware enough to appreciate that. He has one job working at a gas station, and another as a cashier at the supermarket, where he regularly is able to steal food from inventory to feed his family. Both of them make him miserable, dealing with whiny people who don’t know how lucky they are all day. He wants nothing more than to yell at them, to tell them what it’s really like to suffer in life. He wouldn’t do that though. He knows how much I would despise him if he did. I already hate the boy a lot, but that’s one of the things I would never forgive him for.

  Today, Gus’ first job was to work at the grocery store. He walks in through the sliding doors, heads straight to the back and slides on the ugly apron that they force him to wear. Not wanting to deal with any of his co-workers or hang around long enough for his boss to notice him, he quickly heads straight to the cash register that he is supposed to man that day. For the first few hours,  he works without an issue. The customer’s can tell that there’s something wrong with him, but they all have their own lives to worry about. They can only wish that one day they’ll be lucky enough to have enough time to care if a stranger is high or not. Then, Gus sees the worst type of customer enter his line.

  She‘s a middle-aged women, slightly overweight, and likely either a mom or envious of all the moms out there. She’s chatting loudly on the phone about how her miserable most recent spa treatment was, making sure that anybody else who may be having a conversation near her could only possibly hear her talking about about her struggles. After the customer in front of her moves, she stays still, continuing her conversation on the phone and oblivious to the fact that she is holding up the line, unaware that Gus is the one who will get in trouble if the manager notices the delay. I tell Gus to stay calm, that he has to treat her nicely or there will be hell to pay. Unfortunately, Gus is no longer in the habit of listening to me.

  “Can you just stop yabbering and pay attention? You’re holding up the line.” Gus just wants to be high right now and his frustration that he can’t causes him to break his usual quietness.

  “I’m sorry. You could be a bit nicer a...” The lady trails off as soon as she looks up, smelling that easily-distinguishable stench and seeing the the tired and still somewhat glazed eyes of the boy it came from, a boy who had already pissed her off. I told Gus to be nice to her. I warned him. “Are you high?”

  “No.” Gus responds unconvincingly. “I--I just, uh… didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

  “Oh, really?” Unsurprisingly, the lady seems unconvinced. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Despite her doubts, the lady goes on with her business, conversing loudly on the phone about how clearly high her cashier is and what a loser he must be the entire time. I don’t know if she is just too stupid to realize we can hear her or if she is just rude. Either way, even I feel myself becoming increasingly frustrated. There’s no way that Gus can keep his cool right now. I keep telling him to stay calm, but I knew it’s futile. Still, the miserable boy impresses me, lasting all the way until the customer was starting to walk away before screwing up.

  “Bitch.” He mutters a little too loudly as she’s walking away. As soon as I hear the word come out, I cringe internally. Gus didn’t mean to say it and it was an accurate description of the woman, but none of that mattered. As soon as he says it, the lady spins around with a smile as if she has been waiting for him to screw up. It looks as if she gets her highs off of other people’s misery and thinks she was better than people who got their highs how Gus does because of it. This is a worst case scenario.

  “I think I’d like to speak to you manager, please.” She speaks these dreaded words in an irksome high-pitched voice of glee. It takes all of my strength to restrain Gus from attacking her. I tell him that he’s already likely out of a job, and that he doesn’t want to end up in jail as well. He tells me that it’s her fault that he’s out of a job, and that she deserves what’s coming for her. In the end, I am barely able to win out. We wait calmly as she speaks to the manager. Eventually, she walks out, smiling at us as she walks by, and the manager calls Gus in.

  “Gus, my friend.” The kind intro and apologetic look the man gives have already given enough of an answer.

  “I’m fired?” Gus doesn’t have the restraint to sit through a whole speech right now without doing something stupid. I saw that, and I told him to cut the manager off as soon as he knew what the consequences were. I’m glad the worthless boy is listening to me for once.

  “I’m afraid so. That lady is very influential among our consumer base and we can’t afford--.” There’s no point in the manager finishing that second sentence. By the time he looks up, Gus is already out of his office and nearly out of the supermarket. I am, as I had promised the night before, still with him, trying to calm him down in any way I know how.

  Gus’ job at the gas station is scheduled to start in under an hour, but somehow I doubt that that’s where we’re going. It’s clear that Gus is no longer in the mood to work and that showing up now will only make matters worse for him, even if it may save him from losing his second job that day. I am in full support of his decision to skip out, return to the apartment, and catch up on some sleep. Unfortunately, Gus isn’t heading to the apartment. Instead, we�
��re heading down side streets and alleys covered in glass from shattered windows towards one of the sketchiest parts of town. Not that Gus’ apartment is in a nice part of town, but at least you don’t expect to get shot if you live there. You’re only concerned about the possibility. I try to tell Gus not to do what he’s going to do, but he isn’t interested. I try to stand up for the boy, but he really is fucking stupid at times.

  “Yoo boy! What the fuck you doin’ here? Ain’t you got work or some shit right now?”  The voice that cries out belongs to Tyler, Gus’ dealer ever since the first one got shot. Tyler is nice, for a drug dealer at least. He looks out for his customers, and even counts them as his friends. Knowing the area we’re in, I’m glad that he was where Gus expected him to be and not somebody else.

  “I wanna buy some stuff. And maybe a gun. I’ve got cash. A hun-fifty” Gus pulls out a nice sum of money that he lifted from the register once he realized that he was going to get fired. I don’t know why he wants a gun, but I’m already doing everything I can to talk him out of it. Not that I expect him to listen.

  “Well, I got some good shit but you ain’t got enough for that and a gun. Why you wan’ a gun anyways?”