I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  “Okay, hon, that’s what I thought.”

  “Thank you so much, Doris. I’m so sorry that she bothered you.”

  “Oh, it’s okay, sweetheart. Have a good day now.”

  This was spiraling out of control. What was Oksana doing in Greenpoint before noon anyway? She lived in Manhattan. I called Chen at work.

  “Hey, man. Uh . . . you didn’t sleep with Oksana, did you?”

  “What? No, of course not. Dude, I would never do something like that to you.”

  “I mean, I don’t have any claim over her so I couldn’t really be mad about it. I would just want to know.”

  “Dude, no. She’s yours. I’m with Kara anyway. Why would you even ask a question like that?”

  “She texted me this morning saying you guys had got it on.”

  “Ugh. Man, she’s just trying to find other ways to get under your skin. Don’t let that bitch get to you.”

  “Okay, man. I . . . I’m glad I called you about it.”

  But something about it stuck in my head.

  Sunday, I got drunk at Pianos, trying to put it all together. When I was drunk enough, I called Chen and asked him to come pick me up. As we were driving over the Williamsburg Bridge back into Brooklyn, I told him that I knew he’d lied to me, that I knew he’d been with Oksana, and he just needed to tell me.

  He told me to fuck off, that this was total bullshit. What kind of an asshole friend was I to accuse him of something like that? I jumped out at the McGuinness exit ramp while the van was still moving and ran off.

  One of them was lying to me. Oksana had reason to. She had a history of not just mildly plausible lies like this one but ridiculous confabulations. Why did I believe her and not Chen?

  I went to Daddy’s, another bar. I drank more, then went outside. It was raining, a warm, light, cloying rain, like hangover sweat. It couldn’t be true.

  I called Oksana and cussed her out for sowing doubt about my friendship with Chen. She screamed at me for a while. Then she broke down and started crying.

  “What the fuck,” she said between sobs, “I couldn’t believe it either.”

  I hung up. Was this her greatest performance? Or was she for once telling the truth?

  Then I got the craziest idea.

  I sent Oksana a carefully worded text: “Just so you know, Chen has herpes. You may want to get checked out.”

  Seconds later, my phone rang. It was Chen.

  “What the fuck, dude, why are you going around spreading lies about me?”

  He was livid.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You told Oksana I had herpes. I don’t have fucking herpes!”

  “Chen,” I said, “you are fucking busted. I texted Oksana thirty seconds ago. The only way you would know is if she had called you in a panic after she got the text. She would only be panicked if you guys had fucked. You are totally busted, you fucking asshole.”

  Chen started talking, but I hung up; then I turned off my phone. I couldn’t breathe, like I had been kicked in the throat.

  Oksana had wanted to see me on her birthday, and I’d refused. Chen had gone to see her, Chen had gone home with her, and Chen had fucked her three days after she’d had an abortion.

  I paced in front of Daddy’s. I was floating in a cesspool with two humans devoid of humanity, reduced to just their appetites, one for sex and one for love. It was vile, and it was chilling. Of the three of us, who was the most debased?

  Tragic as Chen and Oksana were, I was worse. I would eat anything, drink anything, snort anything, do anything just to escape. If Chen wanted sex and Oksana wanted her twisted version of love, well, at least they wanted something. What I wanted was the absence of everything: nada, nihil, zero.

  Now there were real casualties. Oksana and I had created and destroyed a life. And what about Oksana? She was someone’s daughter. She was crazy, but it was crazy born out of pain, pain I’d only added to. Because I couldn’t stand to be alone. Because I wanted to get laid.

  I thought of my sisters, Tatyana and Tashina, and how many times I’d seen them cry because a man like me had hurt them. I thought about them waiting outside an abortion clinic in a snowstorm, wondering if the drunk they’d been sleeping with was actually going to show up to give them a ride. Christ, Oksana was younger than Tashina, younger than my baby sister.

  I thought of Oksana going under the knife and then, only days later, laying under Chen just to get revenge on me, a worthless man who had only magnified her feelings of worthlessness. This certainly hadn’t been a walk in the park for me. I’d been shedding friends at an alarming rate these last few years, and now I’d lost my confidant, my confessor, my last unconditional ally. But Oksana seemed to have lost her self entirely.

  I stepped back into the bar. I pounded the drink that I had left sitting by the door. I grabbed my coat off my barstool. On my way out, I pounded the drinks of the people smoking outside, then stumbled out into the rain.

  My mother, my poor, beleaguered mother. She had sacrificed so much to make sure I got what I needed from the very day I was born: milk and colorful toys and stuffed animals and then Legos and mac ’n’ cheese and shin guards and a baseball glove right up to losing the fucking house, just so I could go to school to turn out to be . . . what? A doorman. A drunk. A liar, a weasel, a waste. I began to cry.

  At fifteen, in those horrible twenty-four hours of the shooting and the news of my parents’ divorce, I had decided in a self-pitying fury that I was brilliant and doomed. At thirty-two, it was more painful to discover that I was neither brilliant nor doomed, just an entitled, self-hating crybaby.

  I was no tortured artist. How little I had created between my benders and my hangovers . . . I’d intended to die in some gutter motel, a bottle in one hand and a guitar in the other, long before I made thirty. I hadn’t even followed through on that. I had lived into my fourth decade only out of inertia, bored and captive to my own limitations like the normals I hated, except dead broke.

  And the potential I’d been hounded about since I was a kid? The only potential I had fulfilled was my tremendous capacity for failing. It wasn’t just that I had been hustling in NYC for ten years without making it as a musician or a writer. I had never even made it as a bartender.

  What was that first, worst hurt, that trauma of key importance that would explain all the shitty behavior that had followed? The hopelessness of my adolescence—the shooting, the divorce, losing the house—it had warped me, like one of those sad sea turtles whose shell has deformed to accommodate the six-pack holder that has ensnared it. But I had been a prick long before that.

  I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been an asshole, all the way back to when I was probably five years old. At the kids’ table one night when my parents had friends over for dinner, I punched Tatyana in the face so hard that I knocked her tooth out. I mixed soy sauce and seltzer water, told Tashina it was Coke, and then ridiculed her when she trusted me, drank it, and gagged. I stole, I lied, I pooped in the bathtub. I ducked down in the back-seat of our car whenever we drove by the police station, convinced they were going to throw me in jail.

  From the first moment I had known myself, I had understood that I was worthless. My mother had tried desperately to sway me over to the other side, but she’d never succeeded, not for any lasting time. Weakness was more repellent to me than anything else . . . and when it came to weakness, Jesus, I hit it out of the fucking park. Not a lick of self-control, a crawling slave to my appetites, tugging at my prick the minute I was left alone like a chimpanzee, a prisoner of my fears and anxieties and doubts, so fucking soft, all resolution crumpling at the slightest momentary desire. How could I fault Chen or Oksana for their weakness? Weakness coursed through me like I was an antenna; I drew weakness out of the air around me.

  A small, exquisitely painful truth came to me. Nothing bad had ever happened to me. I had nothing to blame my bad behavior on. I’d had a few bad breaks, but who hadn’t? Yet I
had reacted by burrowing so deep into my own pain that it became all I could see. Had I ever once been happy in my life? I fanned through my memories like a stack of index cards. Yes. Once.

  One evening before we had left Canada, my dad had taken me for a walk after dinner. I must have been very young, maybe four. He was wearing brown polyester slacks and a yellow, short-sleeve, button-down shirt with black shoes. I was wearing brown corduroys and a yellow, short-sleeve, button-down shirt with bare feet. I was just like him, except little. My dad was the coolest guy in the world. I realized that, because I was a little like him, I was a little bit cool as well.

  The memory made me emit a stifled half-sob. A woman walking past me took a hopping step away, and her boyfriend gave me a look. Nothing to see here, folks, just another damaged Brooklyn man-child with bad tattoos and a drinking problem and daddy issues. More plentiful than pigeons, much less exciting.

  In the wee hours of May 13, 2009, I began to drink. The preceding day had been a stressful one. I’d been recruited a month earlier to join my old pal Zack’s band, Freshkills, for a ten-day tour of England starting the next day. After the sun went down, I ate some Adderall so I could stay up to pack and do other last-minute errands. At around 2 a.m., it became clear that I was actually going to finish everything I needed to do, so I cracked open a Coors Light. Far from my first choice, but it had been a long time since I’d allowed myself to keep hard liquor or even wine in the house.

  I worked my way through the six-pack and polished off an old vial of cocaine I had in my drug box, a miniature wooden chest that had been a gift to the groomsmen at Chen’s wedding. A couple of days after our blowout, he had confessed to sleeping with Oksana and quit our band. A couple of days after that, he met me at the practice space to pay me back.

  “Mishka,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  He held out the money he owed me. I counted it and put it in my pocket.

  “Thank you for paying me back,” I said. “And now, you’re dead to me.”

  Shortly after 3 a.m., I left the house lugging my effect pedal board and a duffel bag my mom had given me over twenty years earlier, when we moved to the United States. “You’re a big boy now,” she had said, “and it makes sense for you to have a grown-up bag.” I headed toward the rehearsal space to meet up with the rest of the band, stopping off at a bar just before last call to suck down a couple of Jameson doubles. A hired minivan picked us up with all our gear, and we were on our way.

  I was pretty loose by the time we got through security at Newark Airport. I wanted to make sure I slept as much as possible on the overseas flight, so I chewed up a couple of Xanax when we were at our gate. My band mates had to carry me onto the plane.

  There may be no better country to drink in than England. Why had no one mentioned to me that it was legal to drink on the street there? Though we’d never met him before, the first guy we crashed with had beer, coke, and weed laid in for us. Someone—not me—even sprang for a bottle of whiskey.

  England was a welcome interruption from the knot of trouble my life had become. Our shows were uniformly unmemorable (at least I don’t remember them), but with 9 percent beer and cider at every corner store and codeine for sale over the counter, I went for it like we were playing sold-out stadiums. I felt light in a country where no one knew me, unencumbered by the cell phone that had lately brought so much bad news, so many direct personal attacks that I’d had to change the number I’d held for ten years.

  I starved myself so I could spend the little money I’d brought on intoxicants. While most of my band indulged in steaks and scotch, the drummer and I drank in the park like hobos. I was accustomed to a near-constant stream of chemicals, but coupled with the lack of food, they wreaked strange havoc on me.

  In a dream, I encountered Allison in a bombed-out parking lot after a busted gig. She was leaning against an ancient pickup truck. Her honey hair glowed in the imperfect urban dark, her big eyes wise with patience and pain. Most of her weight rested on her right leg, and her right hip jutted out sinisterly, as if her disappointment in me had calcified under her skin. She looked older but defiantly beautiful, like a Dust Bowl–era migrant worker, determined to survive. One child straddled her cocked hip, and another stood next to her, holding her hand and peering out at me from behind her leg. Neither of them looked like me. Allison told me that my father was dead and I had been charged with seeing to his burial.

  The funeral home was a disaster. The coffin was propped up on two sawhorses, and the lid didn’t fit right. I started screaming at the director—my father at least deserved to be treated with dignity in death—and accidentally knocked the coffin over, spilling my father’s gauze-wrapped corpse onto the floor. When I bent over to cradle his body to try to get it back into the coffin, I felt it twist under me. I heard old bones grind, and I felt his teeth, sharp in my shoulder, as his skull tried to bite me through the disintegrating shroud.

  On the flight home, I vigorously abused Virgin Airlines’ complimentary cocktail policy even after the stewardesses stopped walking the aisles offering them. I’d totter back to where the flight attendants were strapped into their tiny folding seats, trying to sleep, to get them to refill five plastic wineglasses—one for each band member, I told them. Then I’d totter back to my seat and drink them all myself. Still, despite glass after plastic glass of crappy red wine, I was unable to achieve “the click,” as Tennessee Williams put it, to reach that drink that “turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there’s peace.”

  I needed to talk to someone, anyone. Zack. He’d known me through all this. He’d have some insight, or at least he’d be able to make me laugh. Zack was asleep. All my band mates were asleep. The entire plane was asleep except for me. I closed my eyes.

  It was never just darkness. Covering my eyes didn’t just shut them off; they kept looking, kept searching. On the plane, my vision swam. Afterimages became objects, then morphed into other objects, advancing and retreating at the same time. I pushed deeper into the swirling field in front of me, seeking something, anything: a sign, an omen, any kind of information at all.

  I saw an old man—maybe only fifty-nine, so younger than my father, but absolutely an old man—washing glasses behind a bar. Silver hair, gray-yellow face, thin shoulders and arms, fat tummy, hunched back. It was me.

  I would get weaker and fatter and grayer and more pathetic, the weird old barback at some old-men’s bar in the Village that took pity on me, that guy who had once been in a band you’d heard of but never listened to, a guy who was supposed to do Some Great Thing but then had done nothing.

  That vision I’d had of the underwater garden in Denver, Jesus, eleven years before? I had been convinced my life was in danger, that if I went too deeply into the underwater garden, I would die. I had been wrong. This vision was worse. More banal and bleaker, like some Twilight Zone deal with the devil.

  Alcohol would never kill me. It took singular focus to die from alcohol, focus that I lacked. Instead, alcohol would keep me alive for an eternity, in suspended animation, like a fetal pig in a jar of formaldehyde, except alive, just barely. It would slowly strangle all the good out of my life, until my life was so base that death would be a release.

  I would create nothing: no songs, no stories. All I would create was pain. As I had hurt Oksana, as I had hurt Allison, as I had hurt countless others, I would hurt countless more, any person foolish enough to care about me, every person foolish enough to care about me. As I had hurt my family, I would hurt my family. I would go on hurting my family until I finally died, and then the last thing I would do in this world would be to hurt them some more.

  I opened my eyes, my heart hammering. I knew what lay ahead, and it terrified me.

  CHAPTER 8

  Breaking the Beast

  By thirty-two, I’d been chasing oblivion for nearly twenty years. Sure, I had taken a couple of breaks, but I’d always known it was temporary. I was like a painter, I’d told myself, and my dri
nking was like a large, complex painting that had gotten away from me. I needed to take some time away from it, but eventually I would return to finish my masterpiece. That chilly spring of 2009 was different. Before our plane even touched down, I’d sworn to myself that I would I quit drinking. For good.

  The first days were misery, but I’d endured misery before. I stuck it out, through the chills, the shakes, the night terrors, weeping in my sleep, the poison sweats, my writhing spine, the clacking-too-fast heartbeat, the phantom pains, the nameless dread, the invisible death in the room. I tossed and turned all night, sweating my sheets into wet piles of slush. I awoke smelling like dry-cleaning fluid. Worst were the waves of shame and humiliation, so powerful that they manifested solely as a physical sensation, like some cold hand was slowly strangling my soul. I felt bad about nothing in particular, and I felt bad about everything. I didn’t want to die; I wanted to never have lived.

  After a couple of days, I got through the acute physical withdrawal. I walked to the grocery store in slow motion, then had to sit down on a bench to rest before I could make it home. I was reminded of National Geographic clips I’d seen as a kid of listless Ethiopians so malnourished and sick from dysentery they could barely move, then felt horrible for comparing my plight to theirs. I had done this to myself. Still, had a fly landed on me, I’d have been hard-pressed to shoo it away.

  After detoxing, I felt less bad without actually feeling better. I avoided Esteban. I ignored my phone. I rarely left the house. I was subject to abrupt, intense depressions. They happened with so little warning and derailed my mood so definitively that I can only compare them to the childhood experience of walking through our house in socks and suddenly stepping in a cold puddle of dog piss pooled on the hardwood floor.

  Sleep was the only respite available from the life I didn’t want. Fittingly, it constantly eluded me. I sleepwalked through each day. I submitted to jarring, sweaty, unsatisfying naps like a cranky infant. I went to bed shortly after sundown like an old man. The minute my head hit the pillow, my heart raced, my blood itched in my veins, my eyes sprang fully open for the first time that day. I had been anaesthetizing myself for so long, it appeared I had actually forgotten how to fall asleep. I tried to remember how I’d done it in the past and could recall neither the process nor the experience.