That night, she slept with Ben Bertocci. The next night, she slept with Ben White. I drank, I wept, I berated her. I told her never to talk to me ever again. I tracked her every move through my friends. She found a new boyfriend, incredibly also named Ben. Parents, please name your sons Arthur.
My mother ground her teeth in her sleep. My back gave out at work, and I was in excruciating pain for three days, unable to get out of bed. We both started losing our hair. I recalled a cautionary tale from a D.A.R.E drug-education lecture in sixth grade: If you dump a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll thrash and kick and do anything he can to get out. But if you put the frog in cool water and incrementally raise the temperature, degree by careful degree, the frog won’t move a muscle, floating idly in water that gets hotter and hotter until he’s finally cooked. But what about frogs like my mother and me, frogs who have adapted to truly frightful conditions and are somehow able to continue living in the boiling water, their flesh scalding, skin peeling off their backs in sheets?
My mother never gave up. Late on Christmas Eve, she stole a Christmas tree for Tashina and me, just backed her car up to the lot and tossed it in.
“You stole that?” Tashina said, incredulous that our pillar of morality was capable of such a clear trespass.
“Well, it’s not like they’re going to need it now, are they?” my mom said, smiling. “Look, it’s even got lights on it!”
I dropped out of CU-Boulder at the end of the semester to move back to Great Barrington. I hadn’t spoken to Riley, and I didn’t intend to, but I felt powerlessly drawn to her. I had forgiven Bertocci—he had written, begging my forgiveness; he had been wasted, and she had waylaid him!—but Ben White would have to be dealt with. My old roommate James had reenrolled at Simon’s Rock to try to get his two-year degree, so I’d meet him in DC, and we’d travel up together. What was my plan, moving to Massachusetts in the dead of winter? Did I intend to settle the score? To win her back? I probably did it because it was the worst idea possible.
Before leaving Colorado, I worked and drank and taken trucker speed and studied for finals until I was worn to a nub. As soon as I got back East, I came down with laryngitis and bronchitis. I spent a week in bed at James’s parents’ house, worrying I would die, then praying I would. His mother brought me to her doctor and paid for the visit and the antibiotics—$80, a princely sum I had not budgeted for.
After I recovered, I had found an apartment close to my fellow hangers-on from Simon’s Rock, a two-bedroom over a doctor’s office. The doctor’s neighbors had taken him to court to force him to paint the dilapidated old building and won. He had painted it eleven different bright, clashing colors. He specialized in pain management, as did I. It was perfect.
I found a roommate, a girl a year behind me, a girl I had never liked, a girl I had openly mocked. We flipped a coin for the bigger room. She won. I encountered Riley and did nothing. I encountered Ben White and did nothing.
I got a job at a pizza place two miles away (a long, cold walk in Massachusetts in January), and I worked at every opportunity. Even at $4.25 an hour, I quickly saved up the $80 I owed and sent it back to James’s parents. They returned my check with a note, thanking me for paying them back but saying it wouldn’t be necessary—I could consider the antibiotics a gift for my approaching eighteenth birthday.
I bought six four-liter jugs of Carlo Rossi at eight bucks a bottle and spent the rest of the money on beer. I kept the jugs at the foot of my mattress as I diligently worked my way through them. My puppies, I called them. It was comforting to hear them clink musically when I rolled over in my bed. When I awoke with night terrors, I had only to reach my feet down and touch the cool, glassy surfaces of the bottles to feel better.
An ex-classmate picked me up while I was walking to work later that winter. She chattered about the latest gossip among our friends and then turned her attention on me.
“You seem to be doing better this year,” she said encouragingly.
I lived in a room the size of a bathroom, a poster of a mushroom cloud rising over Bikini Atoll after the testing of the atomic bomb hanging over my bed. I existed on rice and beans. I washed my body, my hair, and my dishes with tiny bars of soap I stole from the restaurant where I worked. I cut my hair with a razor blade. I obsessed about Riley, and though we didn’t speak, I tracked all the developments in her life—her library job, her new tortoiseshell cat’s eye glasses, her life with her boyfriend, the decline of her tiny green hatchback. She had shown up at the end of my eighteenth birthday party, driven me home, fucked me, then left to go home to her boyfriend. I lost it, crying uncontrollably for a long time. When I finally pulled myself together, I heard my roommate sniffling in her room—I had cried so hard that it made her cry. If I was doing better, I was pretty sure “better” for me was still pretty far below normal for anyone else.
“A bunch of us were worried you were going to kill yourself last year,” she said. “You were just so nihilistic. The only reason we decided you wouldn’t was that you had said suicide was pointless and stupid.”
I laughed out loud, surprising both of us. But it struck me as funny: my nihilism was the only thing that had saved me from myself.
I got a better job at a deli, working sixty hours a week or more. I got hammered every night and drank all day long on my day off. One Sunday, we ran dry, and I made screwdrivers with rubbing alcohol. I was on time or early to work each morning, but the first few hours were brutal.
“You es crazy,” Ernesto, one of the Latino cooks, said to me one morning as I lugged a huge plastic container of raw chicken wings onto the countertop to be prepped before cooking.
Ernesto mimed drinking from a bottle and pointed at me. “Ery night. Ery day.”
I smiled weakly at him, my stomach doing flip-flops at the mere thought of alcohol. I lifted the lid and dumped the chicken wings onto my cutting board. They were starting to go bad, and as the smell wafted up to me, my eyes zeroed in on the clumps of feathers and hair still clinging to them. I dashed for the bathroom, vomit already boiling up my throat and into my mouth, Ernesto’s laughter bouncing off the hard tile floor.
Despite my rough mornings, I was well loved in the kitchen. Dave, my boss, paid me well—I made more than my mother—and my savings piled up. I became obsessed with self-sufficiency, dead set on paying my own way. When my father stopped paying child support for Tashina, I even sent money home to my mom, determined—at eighteen—to be the man he had failed to be.
As I was finding my way, my nemesis, Ben White, had been losing his. He was abusive in class and menaced the kids in his dorm. It was an open secret that he hit women. Still, he hadn’t provided the school with the single overt transgression that would merit expulsion. When he shoved his way through a crowd of women staging a political protest on his way to the dining hall, the school didn’t waste any time. He was escorted from campus that very day. He built a nest in the crawl space at his girlfriend’s house in town and nourished his decline, constantly high on cough syrup he’d shoplifted, barely coherent, hardly eating, vomiting blood, increasingly erratic, increasingly violent.
We were drinking at my house one night. My roommate asked if it was cool if she invited Ben’s girlfriend over. She was a genial Florida party girl who could be counted on to knock over every single drink within reach but was still impossible not to like.
“Ah . . . yeah, that’s fine, just tell her not to bring Ben with her.”
A moment after my roommate made the call, the phone rang again. That would be Ben.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mishka.”
“Hi, Ben.”
“Can I come over?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not friends.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Don’t come over.”
“I’m coming over.”
The line went dead.
When the bell rang, my friend Kevin followed me down the
stairs. I saw Ben’s girlfriend outside by herself: bullet dodged. I opened the door to let her in.
Ben stood up from behind a hedge and tried to skirt past me into the house. Shit. I grabbed him from behind and got him in a full nelson. What now? Ben wouldn’t punch me or tackle me if I released him. He’d gouge out an eye, stab me, choke me to death.
He had gotten so thin that he slipped my hold. I shoved him away and scrambled for the open door. As Kevin kicked the door shut, Ben lunged after me. The glass pane in the door shattered.
I turned the lock and slid the bolt into place. Kevin and I braced the bottom of the door with our feet, holding ourselves clear of the broken window.
Ben slowly pushed through the broken glass till his head and shoulders were inside with us. He stared at me, his eyes flat and dead.
“I’m going to kill you,” he said.
Without breaking my gaze, he rolled his torso around inside the jagged window frame. Blood instantly darkened his T-shirt, and wet folds of it slid down his arms.
“Kevin,” I said, “go upstairs and call the police.”
The cops showed up shortly after Ben left, and they grudgingly took my report. After they had gone, my gathered friends laid into me. What the hell did I think I was doing? We hated cops. Cops weren’t going to do anything. This would only anger Ben enough for him to actually kill me. I didn’t disagree, but I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.
Days later, Ben was gone, having fled back to Florida. Had calling the cops worked? No, he had been too easy to get rid of. I recalled a line from Circus Lupus’s “I Always Thought You Were an Asshole”: “Florida is not so far away / In fact, it’s just another grave.” That story Ben always told about his friend who had set a girl on fire and buried her in a swamp . . . could he have been the one who did it? I wouldn’t feel safe till he was in jail or a mental institution, and I worried that I hadn’t seen the last of him.
One day that summer, my boss called me into his office.
“Sit down, Mishka,” he said.
That was a bad sign. I sat down. He closed the office door behind me. That was another bad sign.
“Listen, Mishka, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life but . . . it’s impossible to work with you and not notice a few things.”
Thank God. Dave was just going to ride me about drinking.
“You are speaking of my good looks? Or is it my joie de vivre?”
“The drinking, Mishka. How much do you drink?”
“Jesus, Dave, you scared me. I thought you were going to fire me.”
“No, no, you’re doing great, my number one guy, I just—”
“I know, Dave, I know, I’m going to kill myself, and I have soooo much to offer and so much potential and blah blah blah, right?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not worried that you’re going to die. You can drink hard for a long time without dying. But there are things worse than death. I’m more worried that you’ll end up behind a desk, like me. Mishka, if I could turn my desk over and fuck it—just for spite—I would.”
I laughed it off in the moment, but slowly Dave’s dread wormed its way into me. My two-bedroom apartment had become a flop for ex–Simon’s Rockers, sleeping seven or eight people at a time, with one in the kitchen and two in the closet. The charm of working to drink/drinking to sleep/sleeping to work had worn off. I could labor eighty hours a week in a hot, wet, filthy kitchen for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for it but varicose veins and fallen arches. How was this lonely drudgery revenge? What would it say on my tombstone, “He Made Great Potato Salad”?
I called my mother, and she helped me reenroll at the University of Colorado. School was the only thing I did well, and I knew college was essential if I hoped to rescue my mother from working poverty. A degree would get me a job, a job would get me money, money would get me revenge. I would slave through the spring and summer, then cross the country once more not to take a stab at college but to annihilate it.
My mom found a house in Boulder, closer to CU, with a finished basement I could live in. The catch was that I had to find a roommate. Fuck, Mom, how would I find a Colorado roommate in Massachusetts?
I asked James, I asked Bertocci, I asked all my buddies. No takers. It came to me at work one day: Scott, a cook in his forties I worked with. He loved Ray Charles, as I did; he had played drums for Lou Reed, and he liked to drink. He would be the perfect roommate.
“Man, I would love to. But I got my kid here. And, you know, this job that I love so much.”
“Hey man, no problem,” I said, feigning hurt. “It’s cool. I didn’t even really want you to live with me, anyway. I’m just asking every person I bump into. Hey, Speck, you want to move to Colorado with me to be my roommate?”
Speck was a dishwasher a couple of years older than me, cute with a black bob and penetrating blue eyes. She had been head of the Judicial Committee at Simon’s Rock. She had compelled me to write a letter to Pay-Rite apologizing for the shoplifting thing, and she had presided over the session in which I’d had to grovel to graduate. She went by Speck instead of her real name, which struck me as self-indulgent. Why she was working as a dishwasher now, I couldn’t figure out, but I knew that I didn’t like her, that I would never like her.
“Sure,” she said.
I had been saving up for a car, but I knew nothing of cars. I only knew that I didn’t want to get ripped off. My father knew everything about cars. He knew everything about everything. He could gaze upon anything—a bicycle, a vacuum cleaner, a particle accelerator—and see an exploded drawing: all the parts and pieces, their names and functions, how they all fit together. In my world, a car had four tires, four doors, and a hood, under which was a Bunch of Stuff. But my dad understood all the mysteries of its inner workings: when the carburetor spins, it creates a magnetic field, which separates the gas-o-trons, which are funneled into the catalytic converter by the spark plugs with a cyclic motion that sets the engine block spinning and—voilà—horsepowers!
Bertocci’s dad helped me find a car, a rust-orange 1986 Ford Bronco II. Paying for the car, the registration, the title, and the insurance took up almost all the money I had saved. But I had a car! One of the other cooks congratulated me. She had owned the same model and loved it. It had burst into flames in her driveway one day. Dave asked me if I had seen that news story about how Ford Broncos were prone to rolling at even very low speeds. The baker just laughed in my face.
On a rare day off two weeks before Speck and I were to leave for Colorado, I walked over to my friend’s house on Castle Street to see if he wanted to go swimming. The door was open, so I walked in. I was halfway to the stairs before I realized someone was sleeping on the couch. I quieted my stride so as not to wake him or her, then glanced down as I passed, curious. It was Ben White.
I slipped up the stairs to my friend’s room, but he wasn’t there. My heart flopped in my chest like a fish on the dock. The police station was only blocks away. Should I climb out a window? No, I’d just sneak silently past that jumble of gaunt limbs on the couch and trot down the hill to the cop shop. They’d bag him, and he would be none the wiser.
As kids, we had practiced moving silently in order to spy on our parents fighting. It never worked. A stair would creak, a knee would pop. I drew a deep breath and crept past Ben White in absolute silence. I marveled once I reached the door. I had done it. Then I glanced over my shoulder and looked right into his open eyes.
Ben White was out of jail before the end of the day. Zack and another of my friends paid his bail. Apparently, Ben had just shown up in the middle of the night with a couple of fifteen-year-old runaways in an old gray sedan. Another news item filtered back to me later that night: the old gray sedan had a couple of guns in the trunk.
At work, I began setting up my cutting board next to the fire exit in order to make a quick escape if Ben White came in blazing. I slept in a different location each night so he wouldn’t know where I was—a night at my art tea
cher’s house, a night in Bertocci’s barn, a night on a friend’s couch. A minor hood I knew offered to get me a 9mm. No, I would rather die than kill.
Two nights before I was to leave, I got shitfaced at Speck’s going-away party, perhaps because I knew there would be no party for me. She was catching a bus the next morning for Philly in order to pack her stuff for Colorado.
I flopped down on a couch and burrowed in for the night. I was exhausted and could not wait to flee Massachusetts. It would be a great relief to hunker down at my mother’s house away from all this drama. I’d work less, no more twelve-hour shifts, and focus exclusively on school. “Mishka, you can’t sleep here,” Speck said, smiling down at me.
“I’m already halfway there.”
“Just come sleep at my apartment. You can sleep in a bed.”
“The magic of alcohol is that it makes the entire world soft and squishy. I’m fine.”
Speck pried me up and walked me, stumbling, back to her apartment. She laid me down in her bed and left the room. I wiggled out of my pants and T-shirt. She had been right. The bed was nice. Soft, clean sheets.
I was just dozing off when she crawled into bed with me and climbed on top.
CHAPTER 4
The Potato Peelings in the Sink Did Not Turn into Vodka as I Had Hoped
Had I grown? My mom seemed smaller in the narrow, cracked driveway of her Boulder rental, her shoulders a little rounder, the skin on her face softer. She cooed over me, rubbing my stubbly chin and gently mocking my facial hair: “Ooh, I almost didn’t recognize you with the mustache! So handsome, like a young Freddie Mercury.” She helped Speck and me unload our bags and boxes into the basement, beds already made up for us, dinner waiting on the stove.
After sleeping for a couple of days, Speck and I crawled out of the basement and got jobs at the closest restaurant, the International House of Pancakes. Speck would hostess and was assigned a scratchy blue dress. I was handed a ridiculous floppy chef’s hat and a matching navy neck scarf. My clothes now stank not of pickles, as they had when I had been working at Sonic Burger, but of pancakes and bacon.
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