Last Night I Sang to the Monster

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I mean, the guy was trying to connect with me. Only it was freaking me out. And then I just knew I had to get out of there. The guy was normal and I wasn’t, I don’t know, I was just, well, I was feeling these things that I just didn’t like. And then for a moment I just froze. I watched him put his trumpet away. “Anytime you want to listen to a song—”

  “Okay,” I said. But I had to get the hell out of there. I had to. We sort of shook hands, you know, like we were friends. We nodded at each other.

  As I was walking out the door, I heard his voice. “Zach, I know you’re sad sometimes. And if you ever want to talk, well, you know where to find me.”

  My heart was beating and my palms were all sweaty and I felt like there was a hummingbird inside my heart and a pump inside my stomach. I found the nearest bathroom and threw up. I was completely torn up. I kept seeing Mr. Garcia’s black eyes, his hands, his face, his eyes, his hair. What was he doing in my head?

  I cried all the way home. I just, hell, I don’t know, I just cried.

  -4-

  When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad’s bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.

  I took a pint of bourbon, put it in my coat pocket and left the house. I walked around drinking and smoking and I kept crying and crying. I was, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know wigged out, sad, drunk, torn to shreds, shit. I hated Mr. Garcia. Why did he tell me things like you’re a brilliant kid? Why did he write amazing on the board? That word was not a true word. It was not a word that lived inside me. And if he thought my papers were amazing, why didn’t he keep that thought to himself? And why did he say, “Is it okay if I like you?” Who the fuck wanted to like a kid like me? I hated that he noticed that I was sad. And I hated that he played that beautiful song. Why would I want to hear a trumpet whispering beautiful lies into my ears? And why the fuck was the guy wasting his time on a kid like me?

  So I walked around and drank and smoked. And cried and yelled at Mr. Garcia. I hate you. I hate you. I thought the liquor was supposed to help. And it sort of did help. It made everything feel farther away. The farther away things felt, the better.

  Mr. Garcia—he’s one of the pieces of paper on my floor. So was the bourbon I liked to drink.

  Pieces of paper.

  Yeah, see, maybe this place that’s supposed to heal me will just hand me a good broom. So I can sweep up the floor that’s in my brain. Maybe I’ll tell Adam that I don’t need to remember. I just need a really good broom.

  REMEMBERING

  Somebody put a calendar on the bulletin board in my room. I guess they wanted to make sure I knew what day it was. I think I heard a voice say, “You can mark the days.” That’s a funny thing to do with days. Mark them. Put an X on them. Cross them out.

  I arrived here on New Year’s Day, 2008. There was a big storm on the night of January 2nd. All that noise woke me up. I lay there and listened to the wind and I swear it was trying to tear down the cabin.

  The wind was like the world. It was this thief that came along and tried to take whatever I had that was left.

  I have this storm inside me. It’s trying to kill me. I wonder sometimes if that’s such a bad thing.

  I know about storms.

  I’m tired.

  I just want to sleep forever.

  Maybe I should tell the storm to go ahead and kill me.

  PERFECT

  -1-

  I always felt guilty about my plan. The plan about getting perfect grades and going to college. I can be seriously mean and selfish. My mom and dad, they loved me. It’s not like they would hug me or touch me or things like that. Not that I like to be touched. This family thing, it’s complicated. Everyone’s got stuff. My mom and dad were trying to deal. My brother was trying to deal. I was trying to deal. Running out on them—maybe that’s not dealing. Maybe that’s just running.

  My mom and dad were doing the best they could. I could see that. Things were not easy for them. I knew my mom was seriously depressed and my dad’s only hobby was drinking. And the thing of it was that I had school and they didn’t. What did they have?

  High school was like going to work. I got paid with A’s. I was really into the studying and the A thing. This one time I thought I was going to explode over a B- I got on a pop quiz in history class. I mean there were firecrackers going off in my stomach and in my head. I was wigging. I went home and started swigging down bourbon. It always felt good, to take a drink, the way that the liquor burned in my throat and sort of exploded in my stomach. Liquor really tore me up. In a good way.

  I went a little mental that night. Well, maybe I went a lot mental. Seriously. I took my baseball bat and went walking around and broke a few windshields. Okay, that doesn’t sound cool, but that’s what I did. I went totally mental. I admit it.

  I ran into some problems and had to run a lot because lots of those cars had alarms. But I really got off on beating the shit out of some of those fancy BMWs. Maybe I was just pissed off because I didn’t have a car. My brother, Santiago, he dropped out of high school and he didn’t have a job but he got a car. I never understood whatever passed between my parents and my brother. Just never got it. Families don’t make sense. You can’t explain them because families, well, they aren’t intellectual. And they aren’t emotional either—at least not mine. We didn’t do the emotion thing very well in my family.

  See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads—just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there.

  So yeah, my brother—the raging ingrate—he gets the car. I make straight A’s and do all kinds of stuff around the house and I don’t get squat.

  -2-

  Sometimes, I get these ideas in my head and I just can’t stop them from entering and it’s like the ideas tell me what to do. When I did stuff like break windshields and crap like that, it wasn’t even as if there were any thoughts in my head. There were just these feelings running through me, bad feelings. Really, really bad feelings. I just wanted to get rid of the feelings. I’m not sure God knew what he was doing when he put feelings inside of us. What is the purpose for human emotions? Will somebody please tell me?

  So there were two things I really worked hard at: not feeling and getting good grades. The getting good grades was easy. The not-feeling part was hard. But I’m working on that. The way I see it is that if I didn’t feel anything, then I wouldn’t wig out anymore. No feelings = no wigging out. The solution was simple. So why is everything so hard?

  My friends were really into drugs and booze. But it’s not as if I wasn’t into the mood-altering substance thing. I tried to be careful. I didn’t want to screw up my plan. And the drinking was cool. It helped, you know? And the other thing was that I was really into cigarettes. Love to smoke. And I’m good at it too.

  Substance abuse. That was a joke me and my friends liked to make. We wanted to write a song about substance abuse. These are some of the lyrics I wrote when we were all stoned out of our heads:

  What is this thing you call substance abuse?

  All I wanna do is forget and get loose.

  Drinking and smoking over and over

  What’s so great about a life that’s sober?

  There’s nothing cool about being young

  When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

  I’m tired of searching for words in the sky.

  All I wanna do is drink and die.

  Nothing is real. It’s all a big lie.

  All I wanna do is drink and die.

  There’s nothing cool about being young

  When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

  You know, that song, it’s another one of those pieces of paper on the floor of my brain. A
nyway, my friends, I really liked them. Antonio and Gloria and Tommy and Mitzie and Albert. God wrote crazy on their hearts when they were born. But it was good when I was with them. It was like we all belonged to each other.

  And they were all really smart. I know people think that druggies are really nothing but a bunch of losers. But the truth is that the smartest kids, they’re the ones doing the drugs. We’re thinkers and we don’t like rules and we have imagination. All right, so we’re also all fucked up. But hey, you think sober people aren’t all fucked up? The world is being run by sober people—and it doesn’t look like it’s working out all that well. Just take me and tear me up.

  My friends, they always made me laugh. Not that I remember a lot of the things we did together. We got smashed. But I didn’t feel alone—that’s what counts. The rest of the time, I just felt like crying. You know, the word sad that’s written on my heart, that word. Sad. Yeah. Crying. Okay. But my friends made me laugh.

  We played games. That was cool. We liked Scrabble. I think we were all sort of in love with words—but we liked to keep those words in our heads most of the time. We had this game. Every week, we’d pick a different word. They were like our own personal passwords—and we couldn’t tell anybody what our passwords were. At the end of each week, we’d pick a new word, and then we’d get high and yell out the old words, the words we were tossing out. I remember one time, these were the words we yelled out:

  Eschatology

  Ephemeral

  Capricious

  Coyote

  Luchar

  Soledad

  Some of the words were in Spanish and some of them were in English. Gloria and Antonio were really into speaking Spanish and even though I had a Mexican last name, it was a language that had been lost in my family. Yeah, well, a lot of things got lost in my family.

  But with my friends, I didn’t feel lost. I liked our words, liked the sound of them as they floated out of their voices. As we got stoned out of our minds, we’d make up sentences using our words. The sentences sounded like entire stories to me. All week long I would write sentences in my head using our words.

  It was like having little pieces of my friends in my head.

  -3-

  At home, well, things were not great. My mom was depressed. I don’t mean that in the regular sense. Sometimes people say things like, “Man, I’m really depressed.” But my mom, she was depressed in the clinical sense. Not that you needed a psych doc to recognize her condition. I don’t know how it all started for her. Long before I was born, that’s for sure. I grew up taking her to different psych docs. She liked to change doctors. That really tore me up.

  I started driving when I was thirteen. Not that I knew what I was doing—but I got the hang of it. The thing of it was that my mom could never drive when she was having what my father called “episodes.” Driving without a license? That’s nothing.

  My mom, she was always on some kind of medication, and things would be okay for a while. She’d cook and clean the house and stuff like that—but then for some reason, she would stop taking her medications. I never really understood that. I’m not her.

  I could always tell when she got off her meds because she’d hug me and tell me that she was well now. “It’s all going to be lovely, Zach.” Lovely. I hate that word.

  I don’t remember a lot of things about growing up. I spent a lot of time playing in the backyard. I think I remember being in love with a tree. That’s weird, I know, but there are worse things than being in love with a tree. Trees are very cool. And they’re alive. More alive than some people.

  We used to have a dog. Her name was Lilly. She slept with me. When I was about five, I found her sleeping under the tree, the tree I was in love with. But she wouldn’t wake up. I was yelling and crying and just, you know, going mental.

  My dad came out. He saw Lilly. He smelled like the bourbon he’d been drinking. “Dogs die,” he said. And then he walked back into the house—to get himself another drink.

  I remember lying down next to Lilly. After a while I just got up and dug a grave. It took me a long time. But I couldn’t just leave Lilly lying there. It wasn’t right.

  I kept asking if I could have another dog but my mom said they were too much trouble. Like she knew. My mom, she didn’t know a thing about taking care of dogs. I mean she didn’t even know anything about taking care of boys. Boys, as in Zach. Not that it mattered. I managed. Look, I’m being mean to my mom. I hate that, when I’m mean. She had to deal with a lot of stuff. I know that. What Adam calls the internal-life stuff. I know it’s hell. Believe me, I know. Shit. I wish I didn’t. But there it is.

  My mom, mostly she stayed inside a dark room that was all hers. She had agoraphobia. That’s what my dad said. Just like her sister. I guess it ran in her family.

  Agoraphobia. That was another way of saying that she was allergic to the sky.

  When she was feeling okay, she’d leave her room and talk to me. I remember this one time she said: “Zach, you’re just like me. You know that, don’t you?” I looked at my mom and tried to smile. Look, smiling is hard for me. “You are,” she said. “You even have my smile.” Shit.

  And then she kissed me. “I miss you.” She said it like I had gone somewhere. I wanted to say, “I miss you too.” I mean, she had gone somewhere. And then she said, “I miss everyone.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Your father doesn’t touch me anymore.”

  Wig me out. It was none of my business whether my parents touched each other or not.

  And then she looked at me and said, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” She squeezed my arm. “Zach, you can touch me if you want.”

  My heart was beating really fast and I felt as if my heart was freezing up, like it was in the middle of a storm and there were things running through my mind, things that were stomping on me, telling me things I didn’t want to know—bad things—and I wanted to take a bat to my own brain. I didn’t, I mean, I just didn’t know what to do so I just smiled at her and nodded. God, there I was with a stupid smile and I hated myself and I thought that maybe there was a knife inside of me, trying to cut me up. I don’t know how I did it, but I did it—I got up and got my book bag. “I have a study session with Antonio and Gloria.” I was trembling and I don’t know how I made myself move or talk or do anything.

  “Do you have to go?” She sounded like a little girl. It was like she was begging me to stay. I was breathing so damn fast that I couldn’t breathe. I know that doesn’t make any sense.

  I needed something. I really needed something. I found my feet moving towards Tommy’s house. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been there.

  “Dude,” he said, “You look really weirded out, man. I mean, you could really use something.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  That was the first time I did coke.

  My body, it was electric. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had a real heart and a real body and I knew that there was this fire in me that could have lit up the entire universe. No book had ever made me feel that way. No human being had ever made me feel like that.

  God, it was incredible to feel so perfect. Look, God didn’t write the word perfect on my heart. But cocaine did what God didn’t. Wow. Perfect.

  I was on fire. I mean it. On fire! The truth is that I wanted to die. It would have been beautiful to die feeling so alive. I knew I’d never be that perfect again.

  REMEMBERING

  I’m riding a tricycle. I’m four. What I’m remembering must be a dream because I have lots of brothers and sisters. I’m wearing a white shirt and black pants and nice dress shoes that hurt my feet. I’m playing with all my brothers and sisters on my dad’s perfect lawn.

  I just want to be alone. I walk away from everyone and I find this very cool tricycle. I start riding it and I’m singing to myself. I’m happy. I look back and see that all my brothers and sisters and my mom and my dad are all piling into the
car. My mom is carrying a present. It’s really pretty with a white silk ribbon. And then the car drives away.

  I wave at them. Bye. Bye. I keep riding my tricycle. I keep singing. I’m happy. I don’t like it when there’s a lot of noise.

  But then, the car comes back and my mother says. “Where were you?”

  And I say, “I was here.”

  “You scared us. We didn’t know where you were. You’re a bad boy scaring me like that.”

  She sounds really, really mad. “I’m sorry,” I say. I feel a knot in my stomach.

  And my mom says, “You’re a bad boy.”

  I want to know why I’m a bad boy. Sometimes, that’s what I say: Zach, you’re a bad boy. That’s really weird, I know. I tear myself up sometimes.

  WHY I DON’T BELIEVE IN CHANGE

  -1-

  It’s not as if my dad was the only father in the world who drank.

  He worked hard and he never missed work. Not ever. Every day, up at 5:30 in the morning, making his own coffee, making his own lunch, going to work.

  And, hell, at the end of the day, the guy was all beat to shit. Sometimes, he came in after work and he could barely talk he was so tired. He’d take a shower and pour himself a drink. He didn’t hook up with other women and stuff like that. He stuck it out, took care of us. So the guy drank. Hey, there are worse things. And look, my mom, she could be great, but there were days she just sat there, tears rolling down her face. She wasn’t very interactive.

  Santiago came home and made noise, threatening to kill us all, then laughed, stoned, that guy. Crazy. But he always took off. And left us to our quiet house.

  The really sad part was that I was afraid of my mom. That’s not normal. You think I don’t know that? Sometimes, I would sit next to her and ask her if she needed anything and she would look at me like I was some kind of demon and she would just slap me. The first time she did that I went to my room and cried. I was a lot younger then. But after a while I sort of expected it. One time, she really went crazy and wouldn’t stop slapping me. And then she cried and cried and I felt really bad for her. I knew that she didn’t mean it. But the whole situation didn’t make me want to come too close. And then there was that conversation about touching that I just couldn’t get out of my mind.