His head pounded and his stomach felt queasy. He hadn’t thrown up after a night of drinking in about three years. He would get a sign for the bathroom, “900 Vomit-Free Days,” if he kept it down.
“What’s up, RJ?” he said tiredly, pained.
“Are you okay? You sound sick or something.”
“I’m fine. What’s up?” Razors stabbed his temples. Rocks rolled in his stomach. Bits and pieces of the things he had said came back.I don’t care what you do. I just wanted to get laid. And the never to be forgotten,Just fuck off.
“I need you to pick me up from the Science Center tonight. We’re out at three and me and Jason are going there to use the library for the science project. Mom’s got a late meeting and she can’t do it, and if I take the bus, I have to walk about four miles and, anyway, I have to be back by six for my math tutor. Okay?”
Richie felt like his brain was maybe swollen. It felt like it was pressing against the front of his skull. The voice on the phone cut through it like a rock through a window, and yet he was strangely outside it. As though he was still drunk. He tried to think how much sleep he’d had. “What time is it?” he said.
“It’s eight-ten,” RJ told him.
Eight-ten? He couldn’t have crashed until three or more. He couldn’t remember. He’d drunk a lot.Ladies and gentlemen, that was the Understatement of the Day, heard right here at Richie Bramley’s House of Drunk a Lot?
“Okay?” RJ repeated. “Pick me up around five? Is that good?”
Richie just wanted to crawl back into bed. Maybe to lie there and die. He’d take a couple of aspirin, maybe some orange juice. Alcohol strips the body of vitamin C.
“Yeah. Five o’clock,” he said.
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Late night.” Guilt flooded over him then, the horror of chatting to his little boy with a hangover the size of a horse. The specter of death standing beside him, poking him with his stick.Na na na boo boo.
“Oh, sorry,” RJ said. “’Kay, I’ll see you later, Dad. ’Bye.”
He hung up and the dial tone was somehow that much worse in his ear and Richie put the phone down, standing on weak, unreliable legs. His body felt like it desperately wanted to shake, but the effort was too much. He stood there for a moment, then stumbled to the front door and opened it, allowing frigid nearly December air to rush over him until he was chilled. It smelled good and cool, and distracting. When he shut the door he felt like a piece of shit again.
What am I doing to myself?
He walked into the kitchen on shaking legs and opened the fridge and got a glass of orange juice. He found the aspirin in the cupboard and swallowed four. He stood there for a moment, leaning against the counter, and thought,That’s not so bad, maybe I’ll just stay up now. Then the juice hit the stomach and rumbled threats, and he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool front of the cupboard door and wanted to die.
He went slowly and painfully back to bed.
* * *
When Richie woke up for the second time that day, he was feeling better but still rough. He wandered downstairs and checked out the clock on the mantel. It was after noon. He’d slept most of the day away, and what he thought about first was the book. He wondered, painfully, if he had lost the momentum he had built up over the previous two days, and castigated himself. The headache was better, but present, and he felt foggy and tired. And contrite.
While coffee brewed he did a quick damage-control assessment and decided there was little he could do except maybe shift some karma around by putting in a day’s work at the computer and making it count. He could call Jen, but he didn’t think she’d want to hear from him just yet. He would give it a couple of days: a couple of days would soften the things he’d said,Just fuck off andjust wanted to get laid, and give her some perspective on maybe howhe felt, having bullshit news like that piled on him. It was a bitchy, princessy thing to do:Oh Richie I’m so sorry I’m getting married but I want your approvalso I won’t feel like the shit I really am.
He went to the front door to get the paper. He’d play with the crossword as usual and go on up to work on the book. Maybe later he’d go for a walk. The fresh air would clear his head.
Richie pulled open the front door and lying at his feet was a small cardboard box with an envelope taped to the top. A light dusting of snow covered it. He bent down and picked it up, shaking the snow off. “Richie” was written across the middle of the envelope in Jennifer’s handwriting. The box was taped shut.
He stared at it for a minute, and then looked up the street for her car. There were no cars other than his parked on the street and, in any case, no footprints on the path, just a fine layer of new snow. He nodded, knowing this was not good (maybe I shouldn’t open it it could be a bomb, ha ha)and reached around and casually got the paper from the mailbox. He took both inside.
He poured himself a cup of coffee first, very aware of the box under his arm, as though it were a live thing, writhing with some kind of malice. The kitchen was still full of dishes stacked haphazardly from the night before. The table was in the dining room, still covered with the tablecloth his mother had given him, although the wrinkled folds were a little less prominent. It was stained here and there with drops of red wine. Two empty bottles sat on top. The bottle of bourbon—half-empty, in true alcoholic fashion—was in the living room, uncapped.
He took everything, coffee, paper, small box, with him to the table in the dining room, two sides of him arguing as to what was in the box. What the letter said. Apology? I’m coming back, here’s a present? Dead flowers and a cryptic note, maybe. He pushed it to the other side of the table and Richie pretended to read the paper. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of eagerness.
His resolve lasted no more than a second or two. He pulled off the envelope and opened it.
There was no greeting. It said, “Here are the few things left from ‘us.’ I would like back my roaster, my pink sweater that you stole, and the ring my grandfather gave you for Christmas last year. It is a family heirloom and I don’t think you should have it. I would appreciate your dropping these things off at Karen’s, then we won’t have to see each other.” It was unsigned.
Could be from anyone, ha ha.
His heart fell into his stomach. His stomach went hard and cold. His face twisted into a pained look that stiffened his cheeks, but made his mouth feel weak and shaky, as though he was going to cry.
He opened the box.Shit. First thing he saw was the little black velvet box, and he didn’t have to open it to know what was inside. Two years earlier, after a huge fight about his drinking, he had bought her a promise ring, a little delicate thing with a small diamond, worth nothing at all to a jeweler. The tiny rock, he’d written in the card that went with the ring, was supposed to be the “seed” from which his promises would grow.Ha ha. She’d been moved to tears. He took out the box and opened it, hoping it would be empty. It wasn’t. The ring was firmly inside the fine velvet slot. He closed it and looked uncaringly at the other things. A ring of keys from the old place. His gold chain from the eighties that he’d given her to wear. His Mets T-shirt, rolled up and shoved into the corner. His single pair of cuff links (which she had stolen); a card to him from his brother in L.A. And that was it.
Could be from anyone.
He leaned his head on one hand and covered his face with the other. His headache returned and his heart pounded. For a second he thought he wasn’t going to be able to breathe. His eyes hurt. They wanted, he knew, to cry.
No. He’d take the pain. He’d earned it. It was his.
(eat it up does it hurt)
Richie’s head shot up out of his hands and looked at the ceiling. The old man. Had he dreamed it? Does it hurt? he’d said. Does it hurt? Something had been on the computer. A poem. Hurting.
He swallowed, his mouth dry. He took a gulp of hot coffee.
Eat it up sweet pain,something like that. Written on the computer. His dad,
standing there in the middle of the room, raising a glass to his son. Like a warning.
The room felt small and close. His eyes glanced at the bottle of bourbon (half-empty) on the living-room table and, just looking at it, he could taste the bitter, sharp smell. He’d been very, very drunk. A bad drunk.
He’d dreamed it, of course. It was so symbolic. Dreamed it or hallucinated the whole thing. Some alcohol could do that to you. (And if he hallucinated, how far away was his first blackout?)
At the edges of his mind, various realities, epiphanies threatened, poking into the sides of his consciousness like little wasps. Blankly, he moved them away.
I’m going to have to watch my drinking,he thought. On the heels of that was the announcer, proclaiming the Second Understatement of the Day. He ignored it and piled the few things into the box, stuffed the letter—could be from anyone ha ha—into the box on top and closed it. It got shoved onto the buffet where it was lost among other stuff, the junk and miscellany of everyday life, letters, bills, keys, piles of change and books. You could hardly make it out with all the other stuff.
Richie opened the paper to the crossword and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He would get upstairs and then everything would be fine. A good day at the computer was all he needed. All he ever needed. And pretty much all he hadn’t fucked up yet that day.
Before going up, he grabbed the spotlight from the toolbox at the back door. Encased in the bright yellow cage was a 120-watt bulb. It cast light for miles. He took it with him to the attic.
All the way up he felt defeated and he hadn’t even started.
Richie stared unproductively at the screen for a good two hours. The crossword puzzle was on the small table where his mouse normally sat, completed; he’d read Ann Landers, his horoscope and, out of desperation, an article about Cher. There was a review about a jazz compilation that he thought sounded pretty good, but if he was honest, he might have said the same thing about a review ofThe Monkees: A Retrospective. He’d smoked a pile of cigarettes and finished his coffee.
He wrote a page that wasn’t bad, but had been hard in coming with at least as many words deleted as kept. Around two he decided he needed a break, something in his stomach and another couple of aspirin to stave off the headache that was coming back, a bad one, that he could feel niggling at the back of his neck, that probably had less to do with his hangover (still in good standing) than the bad morning. So he gave up and went downstairs, toying with the idea of walking downtown, a little fresh air, and boxing up a pile of Jennifer’s shit and sending it to her. See how she liked it. Maybe he’d save that particular thrill for her wedding day. Just thinking the words sent fresh pain into his chest and the headache he had hoped to ward off banged into his skull.
He poured himself more coffee and made a sandwich out of leftover steak, saturating the bread with mustard on one side and ketchup on the other. He cut the meat as thin as possible and the smell turned his stomach slightly, but he had to get something into it. There was nothing else unless he wanted RJ’s cereal, or peanut butter. Neither seemed a comparable prospect so he took the steak sandwich into the dining room and pulled out the rest of the paper.
The sandwich was not sitting nicely in his stomach and his head was pounding anew. He pushed it farther away because the smell was getting to him. He closed his eyes against the pain in his head and just tried to breathe quietly and evenly.
You know what you need?
Everything, in the space of one day, seemed to have gotten away from him. The day before—the trip to town—had been full and easy andgood .
You know what you need?
His body ached to sleep, or just to lie down and be still. He wished the same for his mind.Just wanted to get laid. Just fuck off. There was no way he could lie down then and hope to have a nap. His head would spin with the folly of his death-wish.
The demon liquor.
You know what you need?
Richie carried the remains of his sandwich into the kitchen and took a couple more aspirin. If he took too many more, his ears would start to—you know what you need?—ring. He rinsed the glass, which had only held water, and dried it carefully on the dish towel hanging off the handle of the fridge. It caught the overhead light and sparkled. Déjà vu.
You know what you need?Without thought Richie wandered into the living room, his gait casual and at the same time completely deliberate. At the sofa he leaned over and picked up the bottle (half-empty) of bourbon and poured himself one.
It was awful going down. And instantly soothing and warm, like the voice of an old friend on the phone.
He went upstairs to the attic, feeling suddenly like he was making a terrible compromise and feeling very, very comfortable with that. At the bottom of the stairs in the hall, he turned on the answering machine, hardly noticing that in his other hand, as he worked the controls on the little box, was the bottle of bourbon. Amber liquid sloshed in the bottle, cheerfully, all the way up the stairs.
Things went much better once the compromise had been reached. Richie sipped at a glass of bourbon and wrote the end of the bedroom scene with Porter. He got Porter and his grandfather out at the site where the old man had seen the spaceship and back into the car where they sat at the edge of the road in the shadow of the old man’s most haunted past. They talked about Porter’s parents. Porter cried.
It went well. It read fast and the road scene foreshadowed a scene that would come much later in the book. Richie wrote through the first glass of bourbon, hardly noticing when his hand poured the second. He sipped it, the friendly feeling flowing through him and covering up the mistakes of the day before like a blanket covering a corpse.Nothing to see here, folks. Just go on home. That reminded him uncomfortably about the girl, and he gave his head a shake. What the hell was the guy doing withparts of her? Souvenirs.
Somewhere between the second and third filling of the glass, his typing began to degenerate. He made lots of typos, which forced him to go back and fix them in order to make sense of what he was writing. The ideas were good, though. Good strong ideas. He had just needed to relax.
And relaxed he was. The effect of the bourbon, once the initial buzz had moved up a notch, made him sleepy enough to have a nap. He checked the time on the computer. It was just after four by then, and that gave him lots of time to have a nap and still get some more work done that night. Just after four he decided to do that, planning to sleep no more than an hour, then maybe a bite downtown and then back at it. And nothing more to drink.
He’d get serious. It was going well. The spell was broken.
He woke to the phone ringing, slowly opening his eyes in the dark room and remembering something, something that just touched the edges of memory, but something bad and like déjà vu all over again. The machine picked it up before he could even think about getting out of bed to grab it. For a second he thought it was morning again, and the phone was ringing, waking him up. His head was still sore.
Janis’s voice screamed up the stairwell on the machine.
“WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?”He sat up in bed and in the dark saw his clock radio. It was six-thirtyP .M. Had to be evening. “You call me back, you bastard. Fuck,Richie …” and it trailed off, a mixture of disappointment and disgust.
It was the dial tone that brought it to him. Janis must have hung up then, and the machine continued to record, the annoying high-pitched sound of the dial tone coming up the stairs and it, too, was—
RJ. He was supposed to pick up RJ.
He sprang out of bed and ran down the stairs. At the bottom he was paralyzed with indecision. Should he put on his coat and just drive down there and get him? Was he still waiting? What time was he supposed to pick him up? He fucked up something, because Janis was pissed off. Five. He was supposed to pick him up at five. Was he supposed to pick him up at five?Shit.
Richie picked up the phone and dialed Janis, and tried to think of a lie.
In the end, he hadn’t been able to. He had been left wit
h somewhat of the truth: he told her he’d worked really late the night before, then got at it early in the morning and had simply fallen asleep. Two lies and a truth. He hung up, dejected and mortified by his own behavior. Janis had wrung him out. RJ had waited a full hour outside in the cold, turned down a ride from Jason’s mother, then started to worry that something terrible had happened to his father. Finally he called Janis on her cell phoneduring her meeting and told her that Richie hadn’t shown up. Then Janis had worried. Shecut her meeting short, and they had driven the route home that Richie would have taken—all the way to his house—and saw the lights out and his car outside on the street. She had contemplated going in andkilling him, but RJ was upset and she just took him home. He’d missed his math tutor, and that was thirty-five dollars she’d have to pay anyway (and no way am I paying it, buddy, that particular bill is yours,she’d said). What the fuck was he thinking?
“Were you drinking?” she asked, in the tone of voice that was a curious mixture of concern and disgust.
He’d answered, quickly, with utter indignation. “Of course not!” horrified even as he answered her that she would have the nerve (thenerve ) to ask and that she’d been right. He might have been drinking. He hadnot been drunk.
In all, Richie had managed to say two other things. He’d asked to speak to RJ, and Janis told him RJ was too mad at him to talk. And then he’d said, stupidly, “He has a math tutor?” in a vain attempt to distract her from the conversation.
To that Janis had said, “What kind of a father are you hoping to be, Richie? What kind?” And then she hung up.
He sat on the couch. His kid. Jen. The book that wouldn’t be. He thought horrible thoughts of himself, the sort of thoughts that ended with no realization outside killing himself for the sake of society and the people he loved. They threatened to drown him. Thoughts went round and round in his head.
So he would have a drink. Just one. He needed one. No one would deny that.
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