by Jason Myers
“It’s really nice,” I tell her. “Incredible, actually. But it’s hard for me to be all that stoked sometimes because it’s so sick that I’m even here.”
“It’s not sick, man. Like, have you stopped to think that this is where you belong?”
“No.”
“That’s so sad,” she says.
“But I don’t belong here, Dominique. I don’t belong with my father in his mansion with his maids. No way. That asshole violently took himself out of my life and stayed out of it. I belong with the lady who left with nothing. Not even a hundred bucks. The lady who walked out on everything she’d worked for since she was a little kid in order to save me from him.”
“Dude,” she goes. “I’m not gonna pretend like I know anything about your life and what that was like. But you’re being really hard on your father.”
“I know I am, and he deserves it.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Who am I to say he doesn’t? But you’ve been in San Francisco now for two nights with him.”
“So what?”
“How big of a monster is he? Like, you got to buy records yesterday and go to some crazy party at RVCA and see Toast. Then look at today, man. This has been such a rad, amazing day.”
Letting go of Dominique’s hand now, I say, “What’s your point?”
“Don’t get angry with me.”
“What’s your point, Dominique?”
We stop walking now and face each other on the sidewalk.
“Go on,” I say. “Tell me.”
“It’s just that he seems to be treating you pretty okay, Jaime. He’s been nothing like a monster to you.”
I get worked up and start to say something, but she cuts me off.
She says, “I’m not done. You wanted me to tell you, so let me tell you.”
“Yeah?” I snap.
“I’m not saying he didn’t do any terrible things. Clearly he did something. But he’s being really nice to you and letting you have your space.”
“Great,” I say. “Way to be a father.”
“Would you want it the other way, Jaime? Would you really want him breathing down your neck and trying to spend every second with you?”
I roll my eyes and look away from her.
“Like, he’s not being mean to you. He’s not been the same person to you that he was to your mother.”
“So what?”
“All’s I’m saying is that you can totally hate someone for something they did to someone you love the most and care so much about. That’s pretty natural to me, man. I get that.”
“Exactly.”
“But that doesn’t mean you have to toe the same line as your mother. You can still hate him for what he did to her while forging out a relationship with him on some level. This is a little bit deeper than some person fucking over your friend at school. This is blood, Jaime. And your father helped make you, and your father is the only person you have if something happens to your mother. He flew to Illinois the night he found out to bring you back to his house and into his life. Isn’t there anything in that you can appreciate?”
Swinging my eyes back on Dominique, I say, “No.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“And what would you know about any of this, Dominique? Huh? How could you possibly think you know anything about my situation?”
“I’m not saying I do, Jaime.”
“Really?” I say sarcastically. “Really?”
“Yeah. At least you have a fucking chance to see if the horrible man who fucked your mother over is the same horrible man who might fuck you over. At least you have a chance to find that out, man. Not everyone gets that.”
“Why are you sticking up for my father?” I ask her.
Dominique throws her arms into the air and goes, “I’m not, Jaime. I’m sticking up for you and the opportunity you fucking have to at least get to know the man you hate so much and find out for yourself if he’s really a monster or someone who made some terrible choices years ago. You have a real chance to see for yourself if he’s still that same person or if he’s changed because of that and become something better.”
“Why is this all on me?” I snap. “Why can’t he be the one who clears some way for a middle ground?”
“Jaime,” she says.
“What?”
“He has.”
“Bullshit.”
“He came to you and brought you into his home.”
“Because he had to.”
“He still did it, dude. There isn’t even a path anymore. He brought you right into his life. This is the middle ground, man. And it’s all on you to decide if you can work in it.”
57.
ME AND DOMINIQUE, WE’RE STANDING next to the escalators of the Muni station. She’s got one earphone in her ear and I’ve got one in mine and she plays that Youth Lagoon song “July.”
We’re done arguing now. It wasn’t even a real fucking argument, but it got personal, which invited, like, a thousand pounds of anxiety to show up, and then it got quiet for a block—a block that consisted of me trying to convince myself that I should bail. Jump into a cab and leave. Forget her forever. Wipe this random blip from my brain, then talk shit about her every chance I get for the rest of my life. Refuse to acknowledge all of her commentary on my life, which I openly invited and really hate—until Dominique reached over and grabbed me and said, “You don’t have to make this a pissing contest, Jaime. It’s not as personal as you think.”
“I’m not doing that,” I said.
“Sure you are. But you’re hypersensitive to that kind of shit. It’s fine. Just don’t shut me out.”
It was the first time in my life that somebody decided to make me feel better by telling the truth about how they felt instead of doubling down and blowing that anxiety up a million times over.
She was frowning, but it didn’t feel like it to me. Her frown was so much better than anyone else in the world’s smile.
Like five seconds later, I finally cracked and went, “I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“On all the mothers’ graves in the world.”
“Killer.”
Dominique leans into me now, and she lays her head against my shoulder.
“Five minutes,” she says.
“Till what?”
“The next train home.”
“That sucks.”
“Why?”
I don’t answer her.
“Why does it suck, Jaime?”
“You know why.”
She squeezes me now.
“Told you,” I say.
“I wanna see you tomorrow.”
“When?”
“Before you go to Brandon’s.”
“Okay.”
“Come to my house,” she says. “I wanna show you my synth and keyboard.”
“We should make some music, too.”
“Definitely.”
“I like this.”
“So do I, Jaime.”
She lifts her head up. I can feel the glare from her eyes on me.
“Stop thinking about why this is happening between me and you,” she says.
“It’s hard not to.”
“What I’ve come to realize is that nothing I can say will ever make you stop thinking.”
“Probably not.”
“So all I can do is show you why.”
“You think that’ll work?”
She giggles and then kisses the side of my neck.
“It already is,” she says. Then, “I have to go now.”
“All right.”
Stepping in front of me, looking me straight in the eyes, Dominique says, “It’s not that you don’t know how to trust, Jaime.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No,” she goes. “I’m not.” She grabs both my hands now. “I’m not wrong.”
“Then what is it?” I ask.
“It’s that you don’t know how not to not trust.”
Pause.
“So no more bullshit pseudo emotional armor.”
Another pause.
“Quit looking for reasons to stay all alone.”
“It’s safe, though.”
“No, it’s not. This is safe.”
I look away from her.
“This is real, man,” she says.
She kisses my neck again.
“So don’t try and stop it,” she says.
“Why?”
“Cos you can’t, Jaime. It’s too late. It’s already happening.”
Dominique wraps her arms around me and squeezes me for, like, ten seconds. When she lets go, she says, “This part, right here.”
“It’s the best.”
“It most certainly is,” she says, as Youth Lagoon sings . . .
“Five years ago, in my backyard, I sang love away, little did I know that real love had not quite yet found me . . .”
After she kisses my neck again, she pulls the earphone from my ear and then disappears down the stairs.
58.
THE FIRST TIME I EVER smoked the blue, I knew there was no turning back the second I released the dragon from my lungs. Inhaling that smoke, it was like I’d just pumped my body full with the very happiest point I’d get to naturally during the day, except it was like I’d hit that point twenty times all at once.
This is the kind of happiness you only get by paying for it.
Or by stealing it from your mother.
My mother, she’s the reason I smoke two instead of one this morning. I’m nervous and I’m anxious. Today is the day I finally get to talk to her. This should be so easy, ya know, it should be. It’s a fucking phone call. But that’s just not possible.
Easy isn’t possible with this particular group of turd burglars.
Basically, this hospital administrator has told my father that he needs to be in the same room with me during the phone call.
“Not happening,” I tell my father.
“Then you’re not talking to her,” he says. “Those are the rules that they set.”
“Fuck that. Fuck you!”
I hold the phone to my ear and go, “Listen. My father will not be in the room with me.”
The administrator guy starts to say something, but I cut him off.
I say, “This is the deal, man. These are the rules that I’m setting.”
My father is standing there, just watching me talk. He looks angry. So what?
I go, “This is my mother. She’s all I have, and she won’t talk to me if she knows my father’s in the room. He’s a fuck and he treated her like shit and there’s no way he gets to be a part of this. No way. He’s not our family. He’s a fucking monster.”
“Jaime,” the man says. “You don’t get to dictate the rules.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then I won’t talk to her.”
“Then that would be your choice. Or you can simply allow your father to be in the room with you while you speak to her, and everyone wins.”
“Oh, man,” I say, laughing as I do. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into.”
“Excuse me?”
“What do you think is gonna happen when you tell my mother that she doesn’t get to talk to me?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You think it’s just gonna be okay with her, huh?”
“I’ll explain what happened to her and that’s that.”
“She’ll fucking lose it on you, man. She will come after you right away and try to hurt you very badly. And even if you stop her, it’ll only get worse. She’ll self-destruct right in front of you. She’ll tune you out and become more violent. She’ll start hurting herself once she’s done hurting other patients. And she’ll never listen to you again. You understand that? If you do this, if you enforce this petty, bullshit rule and allow the man who ruined her life to sit in on the phone call with the only person she loves, she’s gone, man. She’ll never come back. And instead of helping this woman and treating her problems and making sure she gets better, you’ll be the one responsible for her demise and you’ll be guilty of anything that happens to anyone else when she acts out. Because she’s going to if she doesn’t get to talk to me. And when she does, it’ll be so violent and shocking. It’ll be so ugly and you’re gonna have to live with yourself knowing that none of it would’ve happened if you’d just let me talk to her without that awful man in the room.”
“Jaime,” he says.
“I’m hanging up in five seconds.”
“Jaime.”
“One, two, three . . . come on, dude. Four.”
“All right,” he says. “Fine.”
“Thank you.” I pull the phone away from my ear and look at my father. “So you’re cool,” I tell him. “You’re excused. Go do whatever it is you’d normally do. Your presence ain’t needed.”
Pause.
“Dude,” I finish, then leave the kitchen and walk to my room.
59.
“I FEEL OKAY. I DO. It’s a little bit better now than it was, but I’m not there yet. It’s like when you’re going to clean a window but you don’t want to be cleaning anything. When you spray the cleaner on it and it starts to trickle down the pane. There’s always that first, tiny bit of dirt that peels right off, ya know, and it looks a little bit better, nicer, but it’s still dirty. And this is the last thing you want to be doing, but you know you have to get it done. You wish that more dirt would come off just by spraying it more. You wish you could just spray it a couple of times and walk away and it would be so clear and clean by the time you came back to it.”
My mother pauses while I watch my hands shake violently.
“I want to leave so bad, Jaime. I want to walk to you. But I can’t do that. I have to make sure I wipe all the dirt away.”
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
Hearing the sound of her voice again is awesome. I’ve missed it. There hasn’t been a single day in my life that I’ve never heard it. It’s really comforting. It’s also maddening.
Like, you did this. You. There’d be no need to walk to me if you’d never let the demons rip you away to begin with.
“I miss you so much, Jaime. My boy. My beautiful boy.”
Not even the numb of the two blues is enough to deflect the sharp edges of each word she says.
“I miss you, too,” I say. “But it’s getting better now for sure, right? You’re gonna be fine soon?”
I stand, then walk to the desk and drop an Oxy on it, covering it with a sheet of paper.
“I will,” she says. “I have to. It’s the only way I get you back. There’s no choice in this for me, Jaime. I’d die if I couldn’t have you back.”
Crushing the pill down into powder with my lighter now, I say, “How does it feel to be sober?”
“Clear,” she says. “The fog is gone and I feel everything so much more. That’s why this is even tougher. I feel your absence and I feel all the shame and the guilt. All the remorse, it hurts so bad. There are no more shields or walls. When it comes at me, I know it’s going to hit. And I know it’s going to hit hard. No more ducking from it, Jaime. No more trying to hide from life.”
I cut the pile of blue into two lines and roll a twenty-dollar bill.
“I feel myself living in my body again. It’s been years. And it hurts. My body hurts.”
I stare at the lines. I wonder if she was here, and she’d just said everything she just did, and then I handed her a mirror with these lines of Oxy on it, I wonder if she’d do them. It’s hard for me to think she wouldn’t. People have to want to quit something to actually quit it for good. Quitting usually doesn’t work when that person is forced to for whatever reason.
“It’s terrifying. Losing everything you’ve been leaning on for as long as I have, all these things you’ve counted on to keep you standing up, it’s horrendous and frightening, but every time I’ve been ready to lose it and break down, I think a
bout how you’re supposed to feel fear when you’re alive. You’re supposed to be scared of some things and uneasy about some things. It’s life. You’re supposed to feel life. And I’ll get to this breaking point and then think how nice it is to actually remember the day I just had. How nice it is to feel something about the day. It’s gorgeous. It’s so much prettier than the fog.”
Pause.
“I’m glad I don’t remember what happened last week, though,” she says. “I’m so glad I don’t remember breaking my finger.”
This is when I lean down and snort both lines of blue.
“Jaime,” she says.
Rubbing my nose, I say, “Yeah.”
“I’m so thankful that you’re different than me. That’s the one silver lining, ya know. That as awful as I was, my son, my beautiful boy hasn’t gone down the same road as me. You’ve been a saint. You’re not out there hating me or getting wasted and doing horrible things and getting in trouble.”
I snap my head all the way back and suck the rest of the Oxy out of my nostrils and down my throat.
Images of me slicing a switchblade through a strange man’s hair, vandalizing cars and slashing tires, smash through my head.
“You’ve turned your back on all of that bullshit. I’m so proud of you. Life gets you high enough. I’m grateful for that. So thrilled and grateful my Jaime doesn’t have any issues, no stupid addictions. You’re too smart for that. And now I’m going to get back to being as smart as you.”
Stepping back from the desk, this nausea hits me.
Sweat begins pouring down my face.
I sit back down on the edge of the bed and breathe slowly.
“This will all be over in a blink of an eye,” she says. “We’ll be back together soon, just me and my boy, and our life will be better than it’s ever been.”
“I hope so,” I barely manage to say.
“I know so. Just a blink of an eye,” she says again. “And it’ll be like none of this ever happened. I can’t wait for that. I can’t wait to feel like tomorrow really is the first day of my life.”
“Awesome,” I say, after wiping the sweat off with my shirt.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Click.
The phone falls out of my hand and I run out of the room, sprint down the hallway and into the bathroom.