Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “Well—” he protested. Then he had a long pause. “I’m sorry. It was. But I still think you did it out of love, not guilt. We don’t have anything to feel badly about—”

  “Except he probably already has a needle in his arm.”

  “Eight hundred dollars is not so much. Why don’t you wait until I’m home in an hour or two to call Milly?”

  “Because you think he might come back?” she asked.

  “He can’t live with us again,” Christian said swiftly. “The most we’ll do is make calls to try to put him in a halfway house, or in detox if he needs it.”

  Kyla let out a very deep sigh. “This is the day it all went south,” she announced.

  “Call your sponsor, darling. I love you and I’ll see you soon.”

  She sat there for another fifteen minutes, crying weakly. She walked around the house, looking for signs of Mateo. He’d denuded the guest room of his belongings, except for the black knit skater-boy-type cap he’d been wearing day in and day out, as a kind of security blanket, pulled down low so that the fold touched his massive opaque-black sunglasses. Now he was out there with a needle in his arm without his security hat, which prompted Kyla’s first raw, excruciating pang of true maternal misery over the situation.

  Because she’d been growing to love Mateo. “What’s the biggest moment you’ve ever felt in your work?” he’d asked her just last week when they were walking Lewy—he’d asked her very, very casually because he was a very, very cool customer who never gushed or effused or let on that he derived any satisfaction or thrill from making art. And they’d ended up talking for a very long time about their creative processes, and Kyla had wished Milly could’ve been a fly on the wall and overheard her son’s amazing, articulate thoughts about making art, which obviously Milly and Jared had infused him with. He had loved cooking at night with her and Christian, and after dinner the three of them would watch that stupid but addictive art-competition reality show on Bravo together, then maybe a movie like Opening Night, because she and Christian had gotten Mateo hooked on Cassavetes. And she’d also loved going to meetings with him, presenting him with his sixty-day chip, and she was going to present him his ninety-day chip. She was bringing the story with Milly full circle.

  We just don’t control how things go. That’s the gist of what her sponsor told her over a forty-two-minute conversation. Then she put down the phone and cried a little more and picked the phone back up and called Milly, got her voice mail. “Hi, it’s Milly, leave a message and I’ll get right back.” I’ll get right back. So brisk and confident. Milly’d had that message on her voice mail since before this whole drug thing with Mateo had started, three years ago, and she still sounded on it like every­thing was okay.

  The beep went off. “Millipede,” Kyla said slowly, warily. “Mateo’s gone. He took off. Call me. I’m so sorry. Just call me.”

  TEN

  Right Back There Again

  (2012)

  In a one-room efficiency on West Second Street in a nondescript part of downtown Los Angeles—all low-rise beige apartments and a paucity of palm trees along the sun-baked streets—DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” coming out of the cheap speakers attached to the laptop, Mateo sits back against the futon and plunges into vacant bliss while Carrie shoots the syringe into his arm.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, I’ve been waiting so long for this,” he manages to say, before his eyes all but close and he’s with her again, her million little fingers scratching through his belly insides so nicely. God, it’s been so long since the last time in New York—eighty-six days exactly—and now it feels so pure, so pristine. It was worth the wait.

  Carrie pulls out the needle. “Can you shoot me now?” she asks.

  Mateo met her at a meeting in downtown L.A. when she had been only a few weeks clean. The minute he saw her—the cropped, bleached hair; the huge, beautiful, wary brown eyes; the pale skin and the perfect Cupid’s bow of a mouth twisted into a scowl; the large birthmark by her right eye; the nipples murmuring underneath her tank top and the skinny, tattooed arms folded across them—her whole surly, I-don’t-wanna-be-here energy—he knew he should stay away from her, knew exactly how she’d make him feel. He was at that meeting alone, no Kyla or Christian, and later, he didn’t tell them he’d met Carrie and taken her cell number on the cheap phone Kyla and Christian had bought him so he could stay in touch with them and other twelve-step people. This transaction took place while chatting after the meeting.

  It was a very gritty meeting. It wasn’t the posh, arty, sober people of Silver Lake, the mostly yuppie former alcoholics and potheads with a sprinkling of fairly successful gay guys with meth problems and a couple long-ago glamour cokeheads like Kyla. It was the derelicts and the quasi-homeless dirty, crusty kids of downtown, mostly junkies who’d either fallen from creative grace or, like Carrie, who said she was a singer, only ever fumbled on the fringes of L.A. creative life before sliding totally off the radar. Mateo felt at home there, relieved, with nothing to prove; there were even some blacks and Mexicans there. He sat there with his black knit cap pulled down low and his black shades pushed back up on it, his arms crossed over the threadbare green-striped T-shirt he found in the royal-blue duffel bag of clothes Millimom had thrown together for him when she came to see him at the airport before he schlepped out to rehab in L.A. and then, after leaving rehab, to Kyla and Christian’s. His life had more or less been reduced to this bag, even if Kyla and Christian had given him his own room to set it down in for a while.

  So he sat there in the downtown meeting with his legs spread in the black skinny jeans he’d bought somewhere back in 2010, 2011—that whole foggy period when he was still managing to show up at Pratt but his life was becoming more and more of a nodding dream. That was when needles—spikes, with their horror and then their vise-grip allure, their absolute necessity—floated into the picture. That first time he’d let someone shoot him up, his gut told him there’d be no going back, and his gut had been right.

  And in this meeting, he was horrified to learn it was one of those round-robin formats where everyone who has under a year’s sobriety has to speak when it comes to them. And he’d been exchanging glances, and then even a half-smile and a shrug, with Carrie, when the round-robin came to him.

  “I’m Mateo and I’m a addick,” he said. Every time he said it like this, he thought of the Parentals and how horrified they’d be to hear him talking this put-upon slang—I’m a addick—but he loved it, because he felt it put him squarely with the subterraneans in the whole class structure of Twelve-Step World. At Silver Lake, once, he’d allowed himself to say it like that.

  Kyla, sitting beside him, smiled at him sidelong, amused, and asked, sotto voce, “You a addick?” Minutely, he nodded and smiled, and she scratched his knee for a quick second.

  That was back when he had about seventy-two days. He liked Kyla, he had to admit. She’d been a flickering presence in his life growing up, her trips to New York where she would down endless cups of tea in their kitchen with Millimom, and one vacation he and los Parentales had taken to the West Coast the summer he was thirteen. Kyla was more or less Millimom’s best friend, and he’d always kind of liked her because she had a saucy, direct pushiness and deadpan bite that Millimom, with her perpetual air of just-barely-contained mourning for the planet lacked.

  “You a gangsta,” Kyla would say drily upon first spotting him on her New York visits, as he stood in front of her, just home from school, in jeans falling off his butt, his high-tops splayed out in every direction around the scrunched bottoms of his pants legs, his hair pulled back in a rubber band popping out the slot of his flat-brimmed Yankees cap, his backpack hanging precariously off his shoulders.

  “He talks like a gangsta now,” Millimom would observe drolly, falling into her slow, signature nod.

  He would tip his chin toward Kyla, sitting there sipping her tea with her big,
expensive leather bag at her feet, and pop back, trying not to smile. “Maybe I am a gangsta.”

  “So come here, gangsta,” she would say, laughing, and he’d slouch toward her. Then she’d stand and give him a big hug and kiss while he stood there and maybe just barely put one arm up loosely around her back. “Your art is amazing,” she would say. “I am blown away.”

  “How do you know about my art?”

  Kyla tipped her chin toward Millimom. “Who do you think e-mails me pictures of your art all the time with every tiny update about your awards?”

  Millimom was staring down into her mug of tea, trying to look neutral, inscrutable, but with that bleeding-heart, just-about-to-cry look around the eyes that both touched him and drove him fucking crazy.

  “You didn’t tell me you were doing that,” he finally said to Millimom.

  Milly looked up at him, gestured innocently. “I thought your new work from school was good and I wanted to show it to her,” she said. “Are you mad at me about that, too?” She turned to Kyla. “He’s always mad at me these days.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I just—I just didn’t know that.”

  “And I send her my chapters,” Kyla added. Kyla wrote some kind of weird books, like she was a journalist who traveled around interviewing people and then wrote books instead of articles, he was fairly certain. He didn’t know what to say. He was sensing some peek into their back-world, which he didn’t really understand; he could just sense that it had been weird and maybe slightly lesbionic in that sensitive, touchy-feely white-girl way, and he didn’t want to really know more than that. So instead he just looked at Kyla and shrugged and said, “Well, thanks. Welcome to New York.” He headed toward his room.

  “Thanks for having me,” Kyla called back drily.

  “Mateo,” Millimom said to him.

  He stopped short. “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to know if you remembered about six o’clock tonight.”

  Inwardly, he crumpled in humiliation. She meant the shrink. There’d been some incidents—okay, there’d been a lashing-out incident with Jared-dad that had involved a halfhearted fist to his face, and a verbal lashing-out incident involving her and the word bitch—and, after a few horrible, frozen days when he considered just running away in the night, they’d come into his bedroom very gently and asked if he’d be open to seeing a man in the neighborhood they’d found, a guy a few blocks away named Richard Gallegos, MSW. He wanted to say no but he felt, after the fist and the curse word, maybe there was no way out of it. And this night, he wished he’d forgotten, but unfortunately he’d been thinking of it all day; it was supposed to be his first night seeing him.

  “Yeah, I remembered,” he mumbled back, before going in his room and shutting the door and playing Young Jeezy off the speakers in his laptop and doing homework until five thirty, when Millimom knocked, stuck her head in the door, asked if he was readying himself to leave.

  “It’s only five thirty,” he said, not looking away from the laptop.

  “I just think you should be a little early for the first one,” she said.

  He sat up, sighed deeply, saved what he was working on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get ready.”

  “You want me to walk over with you?”

  Finally, he looked at her. “It’s, like, eight blocks away, right? Why, are you afraid I’m not going to go?”

  Now she sighed, ran a hand through her hair. “No, Mateo. I just thought—” She stopped. “Forget it, of course you can walk over yourself.”

  “Okay,” he said rather pointlessly. He caught her eyes; she caught his. He could clearly read hers. They were saying, Why? Why? Why do you hate me? And he felt his were saying, Please, woman, leave me alone! And then he and she cut their eyes away from each other and she closed the door.

  A few minutes later, he pulled his ponytail back through the gap in his cap, grabbed his keys and cell phone, and walked back out into the kitchen, which smelled like something Asian-y that Millmom was cooking—something ginger-y. Millimom and Jared-dad were at the kitchen table, Jared-dad drinking a glass of red wine, Millimom and Kyla drinking Pellegrino. He barely nodded to them all as he stalked toward the door, hands shoved in his pockets.

  “We’ll eat when you’re back, okay?” Millimom called to him.

  He grunted, but he knew it wasn’t loud enough for them to hear. He didn’t mean to slam the door that loudly behind him, but he still kind of did. Downstairs, he lit a cigarette and pulled out his cell to check the text that Millimom had sent him with the guy’s address. He walked there, rang the buzzer, and was buzzed in to a waiting room with smart-people-type magazines and a few comfortable club chairs and a weird white machine in the corner that made a whirring noise that, he would later learn, was meant to muffle the conversation in the other room.

  He was alone in the waiting room and he just sat there and his anger rose. There they were, the three of them, probably sitting there with their drinks talking about him and what a problem he was, and he . . . why was he the one who had to come here? Why weren’t they here with him? Had he asked them to adopt him? No. And why had they, anyway? Why didn’t they have kids of their own? Oh, he knew the whole story by now. They’d told him when he was twelve. She’d died of AIDS. And Bubbe had known her, blah, blah, blah. Often, he felt that he hated her, his real mother, whoever she was, or had been. What a dumb spic slut to go and get AIDS! He hated everyone, pretty much, except Zoya from school, who he decided right there, on the spot, was actually his girlfriend after all, just like she’d wanted, and he pulled out his cell and started texting her: “Im at the fuckin shrinks office my parents sent me 2.”

  And he had barely sent it when the door opened and a middle-aged white woman, very East Village with her chunky black square glasses, walked out and slipped away. A middle-aged, kind of chubby, sullen-faced Latin-looking guy with very neatly coiffed, short hair and a leather cell-phone holder on his waistband held out his hand and said, with a faint Puerto Rican accent, his name was Richard Gallegos.

  “Mateo.”

  “Come on in.”

  The guy’s office was warm and small and all beigy-type inoffensive colors and smelled nice, like aromatherapy candles, and had two leather club-type chairs facing each other in the middle. There was some ethnic-type banana-lady art on the walls. The guy sat down and talked about some boring insurance stuff and about how Mateo would have to pay anyway if he missed an appointment or canceled later than twenty-four hours in advance. Then he said, “Okay. Okay, Mateo. So, not your idea to come here, right? Mom and Dad’s?”

  I don’t call them that, he was about to say to him. But then he was gripped with such a ferocious anger—even hearing someone say “Mom and Dad” was more than he could take—that he did something very strange. He just looked at this Gallegos guy with more hatred and contempt than he thought he could possibly muster, then pulled his cap down over his face and curled up sideways in the chair, his own face smashed against the back. He knew this was kind of ridiculous and childish, but he just couldn’t deal, and he didn’t know what else to do.

  Mateo waited for Gallegos to say something. For a long time, he didn’t. Then Gallegos said: “You know, whatever’s going on, you might find it a big relief to come here once a week and talk about it. I’m not your parents and you can tell me anything. I won’t judge you and you don’t have to even like me.”

  Mateo stayed in his crouch facing away from him. He allowed himself to consider this idea. Maybe if he just didn’t look at him? He pulled his face away from the leather a bit.

  “It’s just that I don’t really want to be here,” he started.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I wanna just go away. They’re not my real parents anyway. They probably told you that, right?”

  “They’re your adoptive parents, right?”

  “They’re not even
really my parents. And it’s kind of fucked up that they even adopted me. Why didn’t they have their own kids?”

  “Have you ever asked them?”

  Mateo hadn’t. They had never touched on that, the three of them. “No,” he said.

  “Why don’t you?”

  This gave him pause. Would it be so wrong to ask them that? Maybe it would. Then he thought again of the three of them sitting there in the kitchen, talking about him, and his anger redoubled. “I don’t really fucking care why they didn’t,” he said, “I’m just kind of over it.”

  “Well, we don’t have to talk about them now,” Gallegos said. “We can talk about anything.”

  Mateo finally allowed himself to turn, still curled up, his high-tops hanging over the chair’s arm. He glanced at Gallegos, whose face was big, chubby cheeked, soft, feminine with its wire-framed glasses. At least it was brown, Mateo thought. That was kind of a relief amid his parents’ world of white people who thought they were so fucking liberal and multicultural. Gallegos kind of cocked his head and smiled at him a bit.

  Mateo ended up going to him for almost two years, learning to make amiable chat about school and art and future plans, but, really, he never opened his heart to him. He would often look into Gallegos’s broad, caramel-colored face, with its soft, kind brown eyes, and feel strange and uncomfortable stirrings of grief and yearning. Once he’d found this so disconcerting that, right in the middle of Gallegos saying something to him, he had cut his eyes away, his face coloring.

  Gallegos stopped, peered at him. “What just happened?” he asked.

  I wondered for a second if you were my father, Mateo almost told him. That’s the thought that, unbidden, had floated into his head. But he didn’t tell Gallegos that. “I lost track of my thoughts,” he said instead.

  For eighteen months, Gallegos helped Mateo focus on the future, so that by the time he graduated from high school, he was a bit of a star. He’d been able to quiet that bubbling resentment he’d felt toward Millimom and Jared-dad and live peaceably with them. That was the summer of ’09, after high-school graduation, when he knew he was bound for Pratt, when he parted ways amiably with Gallegos.