I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  My legs were crying in pain. My neck was cinched in spasm. My face was chapped and aching from hours of exposure to the winter wind. My right IT band felt like a piece of red-hot wire buried in the side of my leg. I felt absolutely hollowed out, both physically and emotionally drained. But I grinned so hard my cheeks started to cramp and my eyes flooded.

  “I know, Dad. I know.”

  When I got home, I went to the diner near my house and ate a bacon cheeseburger and fries. Then I ordered a steak and eggs and cleaned those plates too. I crawled into bed, but I was in so much pain I couldn’t sleep. After a couple of hours, I got up and ate a quart of yogurt with blueberries. A couple of hours later, I ate another, even licking my bowl clean. I woke up after a full night’s sleep, ate four fried eggs with toast, then went back down for another eight hours of sleep.

  When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I felt battered but satisfied. I had found something bigger than me, something that scared me. I had worked diligently, and then I had been brave. I had taken my licks, and I had won. I didn’t have to explain how difficult it had been to my father, because he understood—we both did—that I had finally done something worthwhile.

  Did that race change me, or had I been changing for a while? My whole life, I had been terrified of being alone. It was monsters under the bed as a kid. In my twenties, it was the Snuffleupagus of Despair, an emptiness that threatened to consume me the minute I was left on my own. A night of solitude had felt monstrous toward the end of my drinking days, and I would do anything to evade it—drink, drugs, escapist sex, anything. Shortly after my first fifty-miler, I was suddenly alright when left to my own devices. Sure, I looked forward to band practice with Zack and my old friends in Freshkills, and I missed my buddies at Beauty Bar after a couple of days off. But I wasn’t lonely or lost and had no trouble filling my days. It wasn’t just that I didn’t crave alcohol anymore (though I didn’t). I was no longer afraid. It struck me as funny: I had run enough that there was no longer anything to escape.

  Still, I had a few things to confront. Turning a person into your drug, that was a low, evil thing, and I couldn’t just let it slip by unaddressed. I tracked down some of the women who’d had the misfortune to be involved with me during my lazy, years-long spiral down. Apologizing to them was even less satisfying than apologizing to my band mates—they were even more generous than my pals.

  “Mishka, I forgave you even in the moment. You told me the first night we met that you were a mess. And, boy, you delivered on that! But you were never unkind.”

  “You were fun, and that’s all I was looking for at that time. I mean, not a whole lot going on at the end of the night. But you were snuggly, and you usually made up for it in the morning.”

  “Um. Did we ever actually . . . you know? I can’t remember, I was so drunk that night.”

  “Mishka, you were so drunk that you probably don’t remember this . . . but I picked you up, not the other way around. It’s sweet of you to think of me, but there’s no apology necessary. I got what I wanted out of it, you know?”

  “Dude, shut up. I should apologize to you.”

  More than one woman sat and listened to my entire apology . . . and then not only refused the apology itself but rejected the entire narrative I’d dwelt on of how I had traumatized her, made her hate me, ruined her life. I had been a blip on the radar, or my sins had been eclipsed by those of the men before and after me, or they even had fond memories of me as this sad, funny whirlwind of cheap liquor and shitty coke. It was maddening.

  I brought it up with Aaron over lunch one day. He listened patiently, a smile playing over his lips.

  “What?” I finally said. “I can see you thinking, and that makes me nervous. Spit it out, man.”

  Aaron grinned.

  “I’m sorry, man, I don’t mean to make light of it. But it’s been really interesting to watch it play out.”

  “Glad you’re entertained. I should have brought a tip bucket.”

  “See, that’s just it. You probably get all kinds of props for the big life change you’ve gone through.”

  “Manopause has been very good to me.”

  “I don’t intend to diminish your accomplishment. It’s a big deal. Kudos.”

  “Yes, golf clap. Cut to the mind-blowing epiphany.”

  “Well, that’s just it. There is none. You haven’t changed.”

  I snorted.

  “Okay, you’ve changed a little bit. Coherent longer, unconscious less. Less of a liability, but also less fun. But you’re the same person. Intelligent. Abrasive. Loyal to the death. The same asshole we’ve come to know and love. The biggest difference is probably . . . there were days when we had band practice where you were so depressed, you couldn’t even lift your head. Couldn’t make eye contact. I haven’t seen that happen once since you quit.”

  “This is such bullshit! What about that time I punched you in the neck in Dayton?”

  He shrugged.

  “I had that coming to me. And that night is memorable not because it was typical but because it was atypical.”

  “But all the drunken bullshit, I mean, passing out on the street . . .”

  Aaron waved a hand.

  “Sure, it was a hassle sometimes. But you were far from the worst person in our crew. It was just part of the package with you. And you made up for it—if you said you were going to help me move furniture at 9 a.m., you were there and ready to work at 8:59, if stinking of whiskey. We didn’t hate you, you did. The day after you’d had a big night, we’d always get these self-lacerating apologies, apologies incommensurate with the sins of the night before.”

  “Thanks, I guess. But I’m pretty sure it was rougher for the women.”

  “What makes you so sure? You were convinced that you were a scourge on your friends, and that’s been credibly debunked. Not to be too reductive here . . . but women are people, too, man. They have needs and desires and issues and personal agency. If they were unhappy with how you were treating them, they were free to leave. And many of them did! The one-night stands and hookups . . . hey, women have been fighting for forty years for the right to act as sleazy as men. Who’s to say they didn’t get exactly what they wanted?

  “All of your trespasses fall neatly under the umbrella of ‘normal human shittiness.’ You never hit a woman. You never menaced a woman. I’ve never even known you to lie to a chick to get her into bed. You were always just like ‘Yo! I’m a train wreck!’ and sometimes it worked. Cheating on Allie, well, that sucks, but here’s news for you: you’re not the first guy to cheat, drunk or sober.

  “I understand your desire to apologize. It’s as noble as it is misguided. You need to realize that the drunk you were in your head and the drunk you were in the world . . . well, there’s a wild disparity there. Hate to break it to you, but you’re not a monster. And you never were.”

  Nearly twenty years of cravenness, trouble, and woe. I’d been sure it had all been my fault. Now I could find no one to agree with me. Shannon had forgiven me quickly and admitted that her instability had rivaled my own. Riley and I had each torn at the other. Speck I certainly owed a real apology to, but both she and Riley had gotten married and moved on with their lives—to contact them now would just dredge up unhappy memories. Though I had apologized to Oksana during our entire fling, I did it once more, sober. She confessed to fabricating her entire tragic history—the dead father, the dead brother, the dead lover, the cancer-stricken mother—then tried to lure me back into bed. Shilpa would agree enthusiastically with every bad thing I might say about myself, but she’d lied and manipulated and made false accusations the entire time I’d known her, to say nothing of the physical abuse I’d endured. When she’d tried to file a spurious lawsuit for over $1 million, well, that had dried up any desire to make things right with her. Allison . . . God, I owed her a long, elegiac apology, a litany of apologies, a never-ending stream of them. She deserved not a letter or a phone call or a painful, awkward lunch but someth
ing epic—a monument of apology. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to make even the smallest gesture toward her, not because she wouldn’t forgive me but because she would.

  Aaron’s theory, it was a total cop-out. I didn’t want to be pardoned. I didn’t want to skate on a technicality. I needed the world to hear my grand apology, then punish me, excoriate me for my sins, and give me absolution. All the shit I’d done, all the nights I’d wasted, all the night’s I’d been wasted . . . I wanted blood to flow. Surely there was someone I had wronged badly, someone who had not moved on or forgotten about it, someone who felt compelled to receive my mea culpa with the same urgency I felt compelled to give it?

  At the same time, Aaron had a point. There was one person I had abused above all others, a person who had elicited ornate cruelty from me, a person who had lived with my foot on his throat for years: me. And if that was true, how to apologize, how to forgive?

  Dave Blum, my editor from the New York Press, emailed me. He had taken a job working for Amazon and wanted to talk to me about a writing opportunity. We met up for breakfast at the Noho Star, a café in downtown Manhattan. Amazon was launching this new platform publishing exclusive content for Kindles, and he wanted me to write for it. I had read about the Kindle. It struck me as just another expensive fad, a way for those burdened with surplus money to alleviate the strain.

  “You could make some serious money,” he said.

  My writing wouldn’t be printed at all; nor would it be available on a website. There was no flat payment for the work, not even fifty or a hundred bucks. I would get paid only for sales of my work, seventy percent of the gross.

  “Dave,” I said, “don’t take this the wrong way . . . but this is the worst fucking idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. It’ll never work. I don’t know a single person who has one of those nerd pads. There’s so much free writing available that nobody’s going to pay to read something. And if it does work, it won’t work for me. Why would people buy something of mine? My mom would buy it, that’s it. Besides, I’m sober now. I don’t have any more stories.”

  “You don’t have one story left?” Dave said.

  I couldn’t think of a single thing. In nearly two years, I hadn’t blacked out anywhere strange; I hadn’t done any weird new drugs; I hadn’t been involved in any rock ’n’ roll depravity on the road. For the first time in seventeen years, my life was stable, verging on boring.

  “Well . . . I did get shipwrecked that one time,” I offered.

  Dave smacked himself in the forehead.

  “Mishka, you asshole! That’s the story.”

  I had written the story of the shipwreck shortly after it happened. It had sat on my hard drive for nearly ten years. If I had ever had a writing career, it was over. But if this story made five hundred bucks, well, it was five hundred bucks I didn’t have before and five hundred bucks I sorely needed. I spent a weekend giving it a spit-polish, then emailed it to Dave.

  Shipwrecked published in April. I refused to let myself hope. Five hundred dollars. I would try to make five hundred dollars. Still, I emailed every single person I knew. Nothing happened. God fucking damn it, nothing ever happened.

  Then Shipwrecked started to creep up in the rankings. Then it crept up further. A week after publication, it hit number one. And stayed there.

  After three weeks, it finally dropped to number seven. Then it roared right back up to number one and stayed there.

  By my rough calculations, I was owed a decent chunk of money. Right, I’d believe it when I got the check. Best to play it safe. Or safe-ish. I mean, it would be more than five hundred bucks, right? I booked a trip out to Albuquerque to see Chuong.

  As soon as I stepped outside the airport, a sporty little white car whipped up, tinted windows, bass thumping. I couldn’t see into the car. This couldn’t be Chuong, could it? The driver’s side door swung open and a dark head popped out.

  “Sup, bro?”

  Chuong.

  He ran over and gave me an awkward little one-arm hug, holding his cigarette away from me. In sixth grade, we’d been almost exactly the same height. He hadn’t grown an inch since then. He felt like a strong child in my arms.

  I threw my bag awkwardly in the trunk, then tried to get into the front seat. It was pulled all the way forward. No way I’d fit in there.

  “Oh, shit. Hold on,” Chuong said. He fiddled with a lever, and the seat slowly slid all the way back. We waited another long, awkward minute while he reclined it almost all the way back.

  “Long time. Sorry.”

  Finally, I was able to squeeze myself into the tiny car. I did up my seat belt, and we zoomed off.

  I looked at Chuong. His skin was much darker, from the sun, and grayer, from the cigarettes. He was careful when he spoke, but I could tell that most of his teeth were gone. There were bags under his eyes, wrinkles under the bags. Ah, I couldn’t have looked much better. Chuong looked at me.

  “So, wassup, bro,” Chuong said and smiled. “How you been?”

  How do you catch someone up on twenty years of sorrow and trouble?

  “Chuong, my brother,” I said, “I been great. Lots to tell you, but I’m great.”

  We loaded up a couple of cars with everyone Chuong knew—his wife, Helen, his mother-in-law, his brothers-in-law, various friends and relatives and friends of relatives—and headed to the restaurant where his brother, Chin, worked. Chin had left Vietnam after Chuong, but they’d arrived in the US around the same time, because Chin hadn’t gotten stuck in the refugee camp. He had been placed with a family in Albuquerque.

  Chin had been prim and proper, clever but too clean-cut and rule abiding for Chuong and me. Though he was my age, whenever he had visited us in Los Alamos, Chuong and I had treated him less like an equal as much as an annoying kid sister. He must have gone to college instead of dropping out in eighth grade like Chuong—maybe he owned the restaurant?

  It was a Japanese hibachi-style restaurant, a big deal in a small city like Albuquerque. The place was packed when we walked in. The hostess looked panicked as our party grew and grew as Chuong’s frail mother-in-law was helped through the door and his boys finished their cigarettes and trickled in. No way were we getting a table.

  Chuong grabbed my arm and pulled me past the hostess.

  “Don’t worry ’bout her, bro.”

  He tugged me through the crowded restaurant to the best table in the house, a huge grill with ten or twelve chairs around it. A tall Asian dude wearing chef’s whites stood behind the grill, wiping a spatula on his apron. His arms were cut with muscle, covered with tattoos. He was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Sup, bro.”

  “Chin? Holy shit, man. You grew!”

  We shook hands. His hand was nearly as big as mine and hard, like rebar in a leather glove.

  “Look at you! You’re a monster. Chuong, is this why you’re so small? Chin ate all the food?”

  “Our dad, he’s tall,” Chin said. “Chuong, he a bad boy, smoke too many cigarettes.”

  I remembered that. Chuong had started smoking when he was eight.

  “But your arms. You a gym rat?”

  “Nah,” he said, fist bumping with the guys in Chuong’s family. “I had to go away a couple of times. Not a lot to do there, you know what I mean?” He winked at me.

  Polite little Chin in prison? Multiple times? It really had been an eternity.

  As soon as we sat down, the show began; a constant stream of dirty jokes, flying food, and sake bombs. Chin was a hell of a cook, a consummate showman, even a good dancer. And, man, he and Chuong could really throw them back.

  We didn’t know how to talk to each other or what to talk about, so we just remembered things out loud. Remember Mom driving us to the movie theater, blasting Guns N’ Roses in the back of the Ford Aerostar? Remember when we found those old Penthouse magazines? Remember when you gave me fish sauce and told me it was Vietnamese beer?

  The busboy kept giving me looks. Was I doing somethin
g wrong? He said something to Chin in Vietnamese.

  “Bro, this guy says he knows you.”

  I looked at him. Dark skin, much darker than the other Vietnamese, even Chuong, with his farmer’s tan. Stocky, with kinky black hair, clearly Vietnamese but somehow less Vietnamese than Chuong or Chin. Holy shit.

  Chuong had had a friend from the refugee camp, a boy named Lum who lived in a group home in Albuquerque. He was “Amer-Asian,” my mom had told me, a word I only knew from a Clash record, the son of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman. I hadn’t gotten it then, but I understood now: an African American soldier and a Vietnamese prostitute. And Lum, a child neither of them wanted.

  “Lum?” I said and stood up.

  Lum threw his head back and laughed. Chin clapped him on the back. Lum dumped his bus tub on the edge of the table and gave me a quick, strong hug.

  “You roll deep with the Vietnamese, bro,” Chin said, nodding. “You need anything—anything—you let us know.”

  Beers had been arriving at our table steadily since we’d sat down. By the time we tucked into the food—ridiculous fare, scallops and shrimp and lobster tails, mounds and mounds of it, more than we could eat, more than twice our number could eat—there was nearly a case of Heineken sitting open next to Chuong.

  “Chuong, you gonna drink all those?”

  “Help yourself, bro. Mi casa . . . it’s your house, too, man.”

  “I’m fine, thanks. But I mean . . . are you going to drink all these?”

  I had drunk a case of beer in one night many times. But I weighed twice what Chuong did.

  “Respect,” he said and thumped his chest. “In Vietnam, somebody help you, when they walk ina restaurant, you send one drink, say thanks for help me. When I come to Albuquerque, I am the only Vietnamese speaking English.”

  He waved an arm at the span of the restaurant. “I get all these motherfuckers jobs.”

  Then he fixed me with his watery eyes.

  “And you teaching me speak English,” he said.

  He raised his Heineken. I grabbed my glass of water and clinked it against his beer bottle. We drank.