Liar

by Rob Roberge

  You do this again when you run out of pills. You cut yourself until your gums bleed. This time, when the dentist sees you, he invites you into his office. He looks at the gouges and cuts under your lower molar.

  He says, “You do not have to keep doing this.”

  “What?”

  “You need the pills, I give you the pills.”

  You are stunned. Free nationalized health care is one thing. Free health care where a doctor will give an addict their drug of choice? It’s heaven on earth.

  From then on, you pay him for the pills. Not a lot. Cheaper than a dealer would charge. Well, of course, he is a dealer. But it’s neat. Professional. You sometimes use too much and end up short for what you can afford and go through dopesickness. But, for the most part, you are kept in Dilaudid until you fly back to the States in 1986.

  —

  2008: You are playing guitar with your friend Billy. He’s a real guitar player, a professional who plays in Jimmie Vaughan’s Tilt-A-Whirl Band. He’s been on stage with Buddy Guy. With Billy Gibbons and Jeff Beck and Hubert Sumlin. He played at Eric fucking Clapton’s birthday party at some castle in England that only holds events for people who’ve been knighted. Sir Eric Clapton steps aside and calls for Billy to take a solo when they’re playing Freddie King’s “Hideaway.”

  You and Billy are in your home studio, playing a shuffle blues. You have your eyes closed. Billy finishes a solo and you start to take yours. You’re playing over the simple changes that Billy—a real player, after all—really knows how to groove on. But, you realize, you actually sound pretty great together. Your solo isn’t the greatest thing ever played, but you sound good. You open your eyes and look over at your friend. You think: He’s played with Buddy Guy and Billy Gibbons and Jeff Beck and Hubert Sumlin. He played at Eric fucking Clapton’s birthday party! Who the fuck are you to be playing with him?

  You make a mistake. Then another. Soon, you are playing like total shit.

  You were playing really well until you started to think.

  And then it hits you: Pretty much every fuckup in your life was a result of thinking when you shouldn’t have been thinking, or not thinking when you should have been.

  —

  1987: You want to take some money out of a bank machine, but you don’t know if you have enough. You chose the New World Bank in Kenmore Square specifically because the machine gives out money in ten-dollar increments, rather than the standard twenty. You are close to broke, you know that much. You’ve just paid the rent, late, in cash. Your original plan was to use the cash for weekend bar-and-drug money, but the landlord actually came to the house and you and your roommates all had to pay up. Now you may not have enough money to eat. You’re hoping your balance is more than ten dollars and don’t feel good about your odds.

  You check your balance. The receipt reads $1,011.22. You stare at it, not moving, until the guy behind you asks if you are done with the machine. You take a few steps away and sit on the stairwell to a second-story business. You stare at the paper. One thousand dollars! It can’t be possible. You start to go into the bank to close your account, but then you think that they could find out and this could be illegal. And there is no way that you will be able to come up with a grand if they want it back. You toss it around in your mind for hours before you call your boss at the ice-cream parlor, Ron. He’s a businessman. He used to run an art gallery. He knows shit about the world that you don’t.

  “Let me call my attorney,” he says and it always strikes you as odd that he says “attorney” instead of “lawyer.” Calling a lawyer an attorney reminds you of being arrested. Attorney is a cop word. You have the right to an attorney. You briefly wonder if you could be arrested for taking this money. Would it be stealing? Well, it is stealing, but is it stealing? You think about being arrested and you shudder, never wanting to go through that again.

  Ron calls you at work the next day. “The only thing they can do is ask for it back.”

  “That’s it?” you say.

  “Legally, that’s it. They ask for it back. If they ever figure it out.”

  On your lunch break, you walk into a bank and a woman asks if she can help you. You are shaking a bit. You feel it especially in your knees.

  “I’d like to close my account,” you say.

  She punches some keys and the same magical thousand dollars comes up.

  You say, “I’m going to do some traveling.” You wonder why you’re lying to her, why you’re inventing this backstory for yourself. Why the fuck would she care what you’re doing with your money?

  She counts the money out in crisp hundred-dollar bills and you walk out of the bank with a thousand dollars and change thick and beautiful in your left front pocket. Your plan is to buy a pre-CBS Stratocaster from Daddy’s Junky Music. It’s at just under a grand and you know, you just know that these are going to skyrocket in value. It could be worth five grand in a few years. You see this coming. You’re an idiot, but you’re not stupid.

  But instead of buying the Stratocaster, you call Mike Way, known as “the Way” to everyone who buys drugs from him. All the dealers have cocaine in Boston in the mid-eighties. Nobody seems to be able to get their hands on heroin. Not even the Way. But he can get you some Percodan. At first you buy an eight ball and thirty or forty pain pills. Later that night, you and your roommates are partying and you decide to call the Way and get another eight ball. You are sharing the blow, but you are keeping the pills all to yourself.

  “You should have gone with the quarter, my man,” he says.

  “Wasn’t thinking ahead.” You tell him to bring at least thirty Percodan as well.

  He delivers the second eight ball. Usually you have to go to him, but he’s made a shitload of money off of you today and he’s acting generous. Well, you suppose he is being generous, if he’s the one walking the streets with the eighth and not you.

  He hands it and the pills to you at the door. “Little extra in there. Went a little heavy for you.”

  You thank him. Like the Way’s a good guy. Like he cares about you.

  There are maybe twenty people in your apartment. You have four roommates and each of them has invited people—mostly women—over.

  You think of something Mary said once: “If a woman is paying for cocaine, she’s doing something wrong.”

  You get far too drunk and the blow keeps you up much longer than you should be up. If you were just drinking, you would have passed out by now. You are talking nonstop to the girlfriend of the lead singer in your band. She’s stunning—she looks like a young Marianne Faithfull.

  You smoke three packs of cigarettes. You will stay up far too late saying stupid shit to a beautiful woman, this girlfriend of your bandmate who somehow ends up in your bed at five in the morning. After you go down on her, difficult given your cocaine-numbed lips and cigarette-burned tongue, you try to fuck and your cock is useless from the blow and the pills and the gin and the beer.

  Around nine o’clock in the morning, you are spooning her from behind and you start to get hard. You think this is a chance to impress one of the most beautiful women who has ever wanted you. To prove your cock isn’t like that—it was a one-off deal.

  She says, “Now you’re ready?” She shakes her head and gets up. “I got two hours sleep and I feel like shit.” She looks down at you, naked. “I shouldn’t even be here.” She leaves.

  The thousand dollars is gone by the end of the week. The Way is out of pills. You start buying in grams, then half grams, then, out of pity, he sells you quarter grams. The lead singer of your band finds out what happened with his girlfriend. The band breaks up.

  —

  2013: The guitar you were going to buy with that magical thousand dollars is worth well over forty thousand dollars now. Though this doesn’t really bother you. There’s no way you would have been able to hold on to it. You probably would have sold it for drugs not long after buying it. You would have fucked up. You know yourself.

  1974: The
confessional poet Anne Sexton kills herself by carbon monoxide poisoning after fighting depression and bipolar illness her entire adult life. She is forty-five.

  —

  2009: You read that your depression is to be expected, medically, even though it’s worse than it’s ever been. The first year people go off opiates, their serotonin and dopamine receptors are fucked and they are prone to severe depression for at least six months after getting clean, sometimes longer. You have a history of depressive episodes as it is. You go a year without a single manic high. You can no longer write. You read your books and wonder who that person was—how he did it. All you are capable of writing are suicide notes. In nine months, you write forty-seven suicide notes. You are smoking again after eleven years off. You figure you’ve earned it. You’re not getting high. Fuck anyone who gives you shit. You don’t plan to be here much longer anyway.

  —

  1983: In what you later list as your fifth concussion when you see the neurologists, you crack the back of your skull so badly you throw up while on your back, and your friend Steve flips you over and saves you from choking to death on your own puke.

  You are at a basement party in high school and you have a two-liter Diet 7UP in one hand and a one-liter bottle of Canadian Club in the other and you are taking deep swigs of one after the other. The last thing you remember before the sound your head makes on the concrete floor—a hard wet crack—is listening to the Dream Syndicate’s “That’s What You Always Say.”

  Your friends have no idea what to do with you. They can’t wake you up, so they drive you to your house, leave you on the front porch, and ring the doorbell until they hear someone coming. Just another time that you will only find out what happened because someone tells you the next day.

  Your sister finds you on the front porch. She tries to revive you. She tries to wake you up and keep your parents out of it, but she can’t.

  This is the first time you have alcohol poisoning.

  Your parents apparently debate taking you to the hospital, but you slowly come around. Or at least you’re talking, if not making sense.

  At one point you scream, “There is no sanctuary for you here, Ramon!”

  You have no idea what this means.

  Your father is cradling your head. His hand, when he pulls it away, is greasy with your blood. But it’s just from a crack in your skin from the swelling, not a deep gash that will need stitches. Your father knows that you, besides being very drunk, have a concussion, and he won’t let you sleep. He stays up with you all night.

  —

  AUGUST 22, 2009: You are two days clean and deep in the throes of dopesickness. You have come out to your wife that you have been using. The night you didn’t kill yourself, you came home and quietly put her pills back in their bottles while she was out. You have told her you’re going to quit. You have no memory of the conversation you have where you tell her you’ve been stealing her pills. You remember something she once said about how if you ever drank again, she would leave you. But you’re so deeply sick at this point, you’re not thinking about that. And, if she did decide to leave you, who could blame her? You think you deserve whatever might come your way, no matter how bad.

  You don’t remember what you said after telling her that you’d been stealing her pills and buying others on the side. You don’t tell her about going out to the shack to kill yourself—the one thing she said she would never forgive you for. You just tell her you’ve been using and that you’re two days clean and getting very sick. You’re apologizing over and over and she stuns you by holding you and telling you that everything’s going to be all right. You think you don’t deserve this—her love—anymore. But you are too broken-down and sick to say anything. You let her hold you for a while before telling her that your whole body hurts so much that you need to lie down.

  That night, she goes with you to a meeting, where you face the shame of taking a newcomer chip. Everyone applauds while you go up to get it, and your body aches and you wonder if you did the right thing in not killing yourself. You get a new sponsor and he will call you several times over the next few days, checking in. At first, you’re too sick to even talk to him. You are in the guest bedroom, puking and shitting yourself and wishing you were dead.

  Later, after you clean up, you will ask Gayle to lock up her pills, so that you cannot get to them anymore. You feel like a child. Like someone who has no control over his desires. But you are someone who has no control. She starts locking her pills away, and does this for years after.

  But meanwhile, your wife has come back from the grocery store with sweets and juice and everything your new sponsor told her might help you get through the first seventy-two hours. When she comes into the guest bedroom to tell you this, you have just fallen asleep for the first time in a day and a half. Your entire body has been a relentless series of red-carpet flashbulb pops of pain. When she wakes you up you say, “I can’t believe you woke me up! Jesus! I was finally asleep!”

  You are curled in a ball of pain and the woman who loves you—who has stood by you, who has forgiven you what you can never forgive yourself—is crying in your bedroom down the hall. And you are thinking: You did this.

  —

  1974: You are having your tonsils out. Everyone has told you that this is a piece of cake. You go in, you come out, you get ice cream and don’t have to go to school for a week. What could go wrong?

  But something goes wrong. Something makes your throat hemorrhage, so that clotted chunks of blood keep showing up on your pillow every time they tell your mother everything is under control.

  You end up in the ICU for a week. The first two days, they tell you that you will be going home soon. After two days, they stop saying this and instead say things like “We need to watch the bleeding” to your mother.

  The hospital is undergoing some construction, so the ICU is also housing a kid who would be in the burn ward if there was a burn ward. He is two beds away from you. His name is Ishmael. He moans all night long and his pain doesn’t even sound quite human to you—more like the noise of some primal animal’s suffering. His mother calls him “Ishy” and cries his name quietly all night long. Ishy, Ishy, Ishy, Ishy, Ishy.

  You do not know it at the time, but you are hearing what a mother sounds like while she watches her child die. You will never forget it. He will be gone in two days.

  You fade in and out of consciousness. You feel like you are swallowing crushed glass. You cough up blood. They put you on meds that have you so loopy you think the tall orderly is Wilt Chamberlain. You love the feeling of the drugs. It’s like being awake and dreaming at the same time. You think, Why can’t life always be like this?

  Your mother will never leave your side. Every time you wake up, you will see her, sitting there, staring at you, holding your hand, not turning around as Ishmael’s mother cries Ishy, Ishy, Ishy.

  —

  2009: About a year after you’ve cleaned up after your relapse, you are still deep in a daily unrelenting depression. You and your wife are driving home from an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting and she says something, trying to cheer you up, since it’s clear you’re down about something. About everything.

  You don’t remember what you say back to her, but you will never forget her response.

  She begins crying and pounding both hands on the steering wheel, screaming, “Why can’t you EVER just be HAPPY?”

  —

  2013: By most estimates, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct.

  —

  1977: The summer Nicole is murdered, your neighbor—a fourteen-year-old girl named Kim Young, from the religious family who moved into the Meyers’ old house the year before—sings “You Light Up My Life” every single day, several times a day. You hear it through her open window.

  Mr. Meyer is the man who taught you to shoot a gun. He also once, while trying to chop out a stubborn root from his yard with an ax, cleaved open a three-inch-long by one
-inch-deep wound just above his ankle. You heard him scream. You don’t remember if your father took him to the hospital or not, but you do remember that for years afterward he would wear the torn sock, never again washed and permanently crusted with his dried blood.

  “There were fucking threads imbedded in the bone,” he says to you at one point. “How fucked up is that?”

  Your mother calls him a lunatic. So does your father. Yet he still had your parents’ permission, as best you can recall, to teach you to shoot a gun. He and his wife both drank a lot—though not as much as Mr. Kesler next door. You had a crush on Hannah, the Meyers’ fifteen-year-old daughter. The day you go to learn to shoot, she comes. It’s why you went. She was going to be there.

  Now the Meyers have moved. You have no idea where. When you are a child and people move out of your neighborhood, they are just gone.

  Not gone like Nicole, but still gone from your life.

  And now Kim Young sings from what used to be Hannah Meyer’s window all summer long.

  —

  MAY 4, 1932: An unidentified woman is found dead with a crushed skull in Stockholm, Sweden. Police note that someone has drunk her blood and the case becomes known as the Vampire Murder Case. It remains unsolved.

  —

  MARCH 2011: For years your liver levels have been a problem whenever you go to the doctor, which makes sense. You have treated it like shit. You get tested at your GP and she doesn’t like your liver levels and draws more blood and sends it off to a specialist.

  The person who does the test makes a mistake and calls you instead of your doctor. She tells you that “His levels have to be watched very closely. Do you know how much he drinks?”