by Rob Roberge
You feel your body jerk and you collapse onto the floor. It sounds like someone dropping a huge duffel bag—the sound of something falling not in stages but all at once. Your body spasms around and you have no control over it. The last thing you remember is your head repeatedly banging against the hardwood floor.
You wake up on the floor. Your arms and legs and head are sore and your elbows and knees are swollen. The clock reads 7:00 a.m.
—
1973: Your parents are at some party and they’ve dragged you along. All the adults have kids, but you don’t know any of them and this terrifies you. You don’t mind being alone by yourself. But you dread being alone around other people. You always have. Nothing is lonelier than being the new kid, the outsider. All the other kids are three or four or five years older than you. Important years. You’re stuck as the youngest person at the party.
You will remember three facts from the party. The first fact is that the adults are upstairs and have made it very clear that the kids are supposed to stay downstairs in what the hostess calls the rumpus room. Her face reminds you of the first open casket you ever saw—she’s wearing a frightening amount of makeup and you want to poke your finger into it. She dresses in a miniskirt and multipatterned halter top and insists you call her Aunt Jill, though you are not in any way related—and corpse-faced Aunt Jill makes it very clear that the kids are not allowed upstairs.
The other kids seem somehow to all know one another—whether they do or not—and this is one of the first times you experience what will become a familiar feeling over the years: being thoroughly uninvited in a social gathering. You will feel like an interruption your whole life. You begin to hate your parents for bringing you to this slice of hell. The only highlight is that you make one shot in a game of pool the other kids finally let you play after you’ve spent hours alone in a corner. Your chest only comes to the height of the table. You’ve missed every other shot you’ve taken, but this one travels the whole length of the table and falls and for a moment you feel, rightly or wrongly, like you’ve impressed the group.
Not long after this triumph, you have to piss, but you’re afraid to approach any of the older kids to ask where you can find the downstairs bathroom. You wait maybe an hour—it could be longer, it could be shorter, but your bladder reaches emergency levels and you’re trapped between asking the big kids about a downstairs bathroom and knowing there must be one upstairs, yet you are far too frightened to go up and break Aunt Jill’s adults-only rule. You don’t want to disappoint or embarrass your parents by appearing upstairs where you’ve been told you don’t belong and are not wanted.
Finally, you can’t wait anymore and decided to risk a trip upstairs. The adults will surely understand the youngest kid more than the other kids will understand you.
You make it halfway up the stairs and piss your pants. The kids all laugh as the piss stain swells in the front of your pants and the piss pools on the steps and finally begins its humiliating dripping from the open-backed stairs onto the carpeted floor. Screams of laughter fill the basement. Some kid says, “Fucking disgusting.”
With the commotion, a group of parents opens the upstairs door and sees you, piss spreading through your brown corduroys—more on the right leg than the left, you will remember. The pool still at your feet. Dripping from the stairs. Your parents come down—your mother seemingly embarrassed, your father angry as hell. You will remember your right sock being soaked and making a squishing noise as you walked to the car.
You have no memory of how your parents handled this once you were alone. What you remember is being in the middle of the stairs between the upstairs and downstairs, trapped between the adults and the kids. You prefer to think they handled it with love. You can’t remember, so you choose to believe what you want to believe.
—
1999: A Hollywood agent sees one of your plays. She corners you after the play and tells you how brilliant you are. How edgy, raw, and risky your work is. She calls your work brave. You think people who save babies from burning buildings are brave, but she’s praising you and you are a sucker for praise.
She says, “Do you write screenplays?”
You have never written a screenplay. Before responding, you think briefly of lives ruined by Hollywood. About Peg Entwistle, the actress who leaped to her death from the H on the Hollywood sign in 1932. How Hollywood fucked up years of Richard Yates’s life and career. You may be the only person in Los Angeles County who has never had the slightest desire to write a screenplay. But you are broke. And she likes your work. You say, “I’ve written a few, sure.” You have no idea how to even format one of the fucking things.
She gives you her card. “Send it to me and let’s have lunch.”
You tell her you’d like to do one more “polish” draft. Would it be cool to have lunch in a couple of weeks?
She tells you to call the office and schedule the lunch.
Writing the script is surprisingly easy—though you will learn that selling one is not easy at all. You send it to her three days before the lunch. Across the table at a place you could never afford, she says, “You’re the real deal,” and takes you on as a client. You never consider whether you really want to do this. You just see getting out of your shit job that only pays sixteen grand a year.
—
1986: Every Sunday morning—or whenever you wake up, which may not actually be morning—you listen to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. You are hungover every morning, but for some reason, Sundays are the only time you listen to Astral Weeks. It is the perfect Sunday hangover music—hypnotic and repetitive, complex but still easy to listen to on repeat. If you have any coke left from the night before, you snort a line and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, while Astral Weeks plays in the background. You do this every Sunday into winter. The snow falls, the streets are white at first, and then everything grows gray, a shift from life to death in front of you. Dull slush sits in the alley where you enter your basement apartment on Marlboro Street. Some Sundays, you play your guitar, which may or may not still have all six strings left after the night before. Every Sunday, you listen to Van Morrison.
—
MARCH 6, 2010: Mark Linkous, leader of the band Sparklehorse, commits suicide by shooting himself in the chest in Knoxville, Tennessee.
In 1996, while opening for Radiohead, Linkous passes out on a combination of antidepressants, Valium, and alcohol in a hotel room bathroom. He is left unconscious with his legs pinned under him for more than twelve hours, cutting off circulation. His heart stops for several minutes after he is lifted up. He nearly loses the use of both legs and is in a wheelchair for six months, never regaining total functional use of his legs. He releases a series of critically acclaimed albums before his suicide in 2010. He is forty-seven.
—
2012: In Chicago, during an August rainstorm, you cut three deep lines into your forearm, drawing enough blood that it runs down your arm, onto your hands, and pools on the sidewalk as it drips off your fingers.
It happens this way. Your wife is sick in a hotel room—too sick to walk around Chicago while you wait eight hours for your flight out of O’Hare. Gina had dropped you at the hotel the night before. You and Gayle made plans to check out at eleven, leave the luggage at the hotel, and hang around Chicago all day. But by ten in the morning, it’s clear your wife is not going to make that eleven o’clock checkout. This angers you—and you immediately hate yourself for being angry. But then, you still resent that this keeps happening and you are angry and guilty and miserable all the same. You hate being late and she’s always late. You have to remind yourself that she’s sick—in pain all the time. A pain you can only imagine. Gayle is so debilitated that you doubt she’ll even make a noon checkout if you extend the reservation, so you go to the desk and book another day. You see that it just cost you $188 because she can’t do this basic, simple thing and be ready on time. And then you feel like an asshole again.
Rain starts to pour, but
you need to get out of the room. Away from your wife, because even though you don’t like being angry with her and you know none of this is her fault, you are angry. Away from your guilt, because who the fuck are you—the man who robbed her of her pain medication for months during your relapse—to judge her in any fucking way?
You have lost your phone charger, which becomes the perfect excuse to get away, so you go out in the rain to find a phone store. On the way to the mobile-phone place, you pass three bars. You want a drink. It hasn’t been this bad in a while. You want what you chased for so many years—you want your brain to feel differently than it feels right now. You feel trapped by yourself and want out, badly. You buy the charger and deliberately walk back the same way to pass the three bars again.
The hotel also has a bar on the ground floor. You look in the window, taking shelter from the rain under a small awning. You are soaked though and your glasses are wet and fogged and when you try to dry them on your shirttail you smudge water all over them.
You think for a while about going into the bar. It’s not like there’s even that much time before the flight. And you couldn’t let Gayle see you drunk, so you are thinking two, maybe three drinks at the most. How good they would feel after so long. The veil of calm that would fall over you. The nerves untangling. Your messy head clearing and quieting. Everything you miss.
You see a shattered bottle of Heineken on the sidewalk, some of the glass slivers still held next to each other by the label’s adhesive backing. You pick up one piece of glass that’s shaped like a slice of pizza. You thinking about walking in the bar and you try to fight it, but you need to change the way you feel somehow. You roll up your wet sleeve. You cut your forearm, deep but not enough for stitches. The three lines swell with blood and immediately you relax and look in the bar and realize you don’t need a drink. The blood mixes with little puddles of rainwater, looking like red squid ink as it spreads and thins.
You roll down your sleeve and go up to your room and charge your phone. A week later you will tell Gina, no one else. Your wife will never know. Never know how close you came to drinking again. You will never mention it to your sponsor or share it at a meeting. You think: It stopped me. Whose business is it, then?
—
1986: You’re back from Holland and you’re managing a Häagen-Dazs in Boston on Charles Street.
It’s a slow, unseasonably cold spring night, but it was warmer when you started your shift and you are wearing cargo shorts. Dire Straits is on the radio. “Telegraph Road.”
You could send your co-worker Brenda home. You should have. You have a crush on her and this is a time in your life when you will sleep with pretty much any attractive woman who is willing to sleep with you. You’ve discovered in the last year or so that you love sex, and you also love variety. On the other hand—and this will make you cringe for years after the fact—in pursuit of both you are also racking up women like trophies. Part of this impulse comes from being so afraid you’re not attractive that you need constant confirmation you are. The other part, you think, sadly, is that you’re kind of a scumbag.
You should let Brenda punch out. There’s no reason for two of you to be there—there hasn’t been a customer in at least thirty minutes and it’s nine o’clock and you’re only an hour before closing. By rights, your boss wouldn’t even blame you if you decided to close early. He’s probably paying the two of you more than he’ll make in the next hour.
But you aren’t thinking of any of this. You are thinking about an hour alone with Brenda when a man with a leather jacket over a gray hooded sweatshirt rushes into the door and points a gun first at you, then Brenda, then back to you and tells you to open the register. Brenda—not you, you will always remember—is smart enough to say, “We’re looking down. At your shoes. We haven’t seen your face.”
You punch the register open and he takes everything.
“The safe,” he says.
You’re unable to move. You feel like someone’s choking you. You can’t talk. Only the owner knows the combo to the safe. It has a drop slot for the white envelopes you fill with cash when there’s too much money in the till.
He screams, “The safe!”
You manage to tell him that neither of you has the combination.
“Bullshit.”
Brenda says, “He’s telling the truth. We just drop the money in.”
He points the gun at your head. You are looking down at his thighs, but you can still tell where his left arm is aiming.
He says very slowly, “What. Is. The. Fucking. Combination?”
You say, “Honest. We have no idea.”
He tells both of you to get on your knees and turn around. You do. You look down at the one-inch-square tiles and think they may be the last thing you ever see. Brenda’s breathing is shallow and quick next to you on your right. You smell hot fudge.
“Really,” he says calmly. “I’m giving you one last chance here.”
You expect to start shaking but a strange calm comes over you. Even in the best of circumstances, you are an anxiety-riddled, neurotic mess. You have to be nearly passed-out drunk to even step on a plane. You panic when you drive over bridges that they will collapse and you will drown. But in this moment, you just think, So this is it? This is how I’m going to die.
“We don’t have the combination,” you say again.
He stands there for a moment and you wonder if this is going to hurt. It will probably be fast, you think. Not even time to feel it. You wish you had sent Brenda home—you have the presence of mind to regret that.
Then, he kicks you in the back and runs out the door.
You are alive.
Your head is swirling with the whoosh that comes from holding a big conch shell up to your ear, only a hundred times louder. You will have no memory of what Brenda says. You know she’s the one who calls the cops.
After what seems like a long time, but must only be a minute at most, you realize “Telegraph Road” is still playing. The song is somewhere around ten minutes, but you would have guessed the thief had been there for at least fifteen or twenty.
Minus the noise in your head, you are still calm.
The cops come. They have their own language. The guy with the gun is a “perpetrator.” The gun is a “weapon.” And so on. You already know this from being arrested a few times. You tell them the only thing you noticed.
“He was left-handed,” you say.
You realize you might piss yourself if you stand here answering questions much longer, that you’ve been holding your bladder since it happened. You ask the cop if you can go to the bathroom, which is in back, behind the freezers.
When you get to the bathroom, you start to feel light-headed and you have to sit to piss. From this position you see the faint outline of the one-inch tiles imbedded on your knees and you start to shake and you cannot, no matter what you do, stop shaking. You could have died. And now, seeing the pattern of the floor tiles pressed into your skin, you are suddenly terrified.
—
1987: In Boston, you overdose on a mixture of benzos and alcohol in the bedroom of some woman you met that night at a party. Earlier, you had fucked. Then you felt yourself really nodding out sitting on her floor, drinking red wine after getting loaded. She later tells you that you started to gag and then stopped breathing.
You wake up on the floor of her apartment while she is roughly shoving ice cubes up your asshole in an attempt to revive you. It works. You come to and see she’s furious. You’re almost certain her name is Toni. She screams at you, “I don’t know you well enough to be sticking ice cubes in your ass!”
—
1989: You are near the end—but not yet, it turns out, at the end—of a very bad and very long run with drinking and drugs and you’ve decided to leave Boston for a place that seems peaceful and tranquil and where you can clean up and inch closer to sobriety. For some reason, you are convinced that trees are essential to sobriety. Clearly it’s the city that isn�
��t working, not the booze or the drugs or you. Time for a move.
You choose Humboldt County.
You have no idea that Humboldt is known for anything, let alone great pot, as pot is not your drug of choice and you don’t even hang out much with people who smoke it. When a joint or bong is passed at a party, you take a hit, but you really have no idea if you even like pot, since you’ve never tried it unless you already have four or five other drugs in your system. When people ask if you like pot, you answer, “It doesn’t seem to do much to me.”
You choose Humboldt almost at random. You are in your student-loan office in Boston, trying to explain why you can’t pay them, when you see a brochure for Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. It has a redwood tree on the cover. A river. Lush evergreens. No drug dealers. It looks like the perfect place to clean up your act, start a new life. Even better, if you are in grad school, you can defer your undergrad loans until later. And you don’t tend to worry much about “later.”
You enroll at Humboldt, drive cross-country after sobering up for a week (you tapered down and your D.T.’s are nowhere near what they’ll be when you finally do quit for good) and are amazed that you don’t wake up puking every morning before your first coffee and cigarette. You and clean living are getting along okay. By the time you reach Lake Tahoe, you have spent more days clean in a row (eight) than in the previous five years combined. A new life awaits.
You start classes at Humboldt State University, but it’s clear from the first you don’t belong—in either the school or the town. You have a terrible living situation with two brothers, Don and Ron Wright. The Wright brothers, though you nickname them the Wrong brothers. They hang with meth heads and drinkers and you spend all your time at home holed up in your room, drinking coffee and working very hard not to drink anything else.
The only bright spot of those two and a half months in Arcata is that you meet Gayle. You first see her at orientation, but you don’t know her name. Then you run into her at the grocery store. You jerk off thinking about her before you even know her name. When you finally do officially meet, you tell her she reminds you of Jodie Foster. She tells you she gets that a lot. You clarify, say you meant the voice, too. That she also sounds like Jodie Foster. And she tells you, yeah, she gets that a lot, too.