LatinosUSA

A fifth of liquor followed four days of anger and I was done. Done drinking. Done pushing so hard that the pressure made it bleed. I uncurled my toes like a good boy and sat patiently numb on one end of the couch. Through the window facing east I could see the Sears Tower, black metal rising into the sky. Go ahead universe. Tell me something.

I did not see her until she was standing right on top of me. Not because I did not want to look at her so much as it hurt my head to focus. Well, I thought, this is it. Give it to me. No need to drag it out hoping to keep it alive. Just club me to death. Might help release this migraine.

She was looking down with an alternating current of fevered condescension and watery-eyed yearning to reconstitute it. My hair was almost as long as hers and when I shook my head it fell across my face and beard and covered one of my eyes. Her prayers had gone long unanswered and I wasn’t going to change. Let me have it, maybe then I can learn. I truly hoped she would. I looked like an Allman Brother but I was no rock star. She was a fiery strawberry blonde with a quick wit and prominent features.

Her neck was straining. And though there was no hiding from that powerful current coursing through me all I could think about right now was the gum she was chewing. Was it spearmint? Peppermint? No, she preferred the fruity kind. Maybe it was Fruit Stripe … no, no, highly unlikely. This city was branded Wrigley.

“I know you don’t want to hear it, again, but you ought to get help. I really mean it. Not just for your drinking. For your moods. There’s medication.”

She was bipolar so she would know. It sure would taste good to kiss you right now. I could not stop the thoughts and if that made me a degenerate asshole then I guess I was. I wanted to catch her words but they kept floating; whole sentences climbing and falling and making me queasy. Other words materialized that had not been invited to the party: rehab … pathetic … weak.

What if I got up and pushed you up against the wall like a movie and we stopped all the talking and made love like four rivers at the confluence? What she was saying was true. About my moods. But when you were brought up like I was in a culture of fear and self-sufficiency there was no asking for help. If you needed a psychiatrist it meant you were crazy. If you were crazy that meant you were weak and could not be trusted.

“Will you think on it?” she asked.

“I will.” The instant I spoke her jaw started moving faster. She was manipulating the gum with her wisdom teeth which they never took out because she was neglected as a kid.

“Promise?”

“I said I will – so I will.” My channel was tuned way back to middle school and my first girlfriend, Ellie, how we snuck out to the back of the pizza parlor and french-kissed. I don’t know about her but it was my first time ever.

She would not say it. Between the lines I read that if I didn’t do something soon it was game over. I was empty and numb after a hundred hours of basic misery, watching tv until tv was essentially watching me, locked in my house, dangerously safe, talking to myself, dreaming, wrapping the dutiful land with sky and milky clouds, round and full, with bright yet distant hopes.

It all started five days earlier …

Ukrainian Village. The side of my face pressed into an interminable chain link fence. A well-dressed middle-aged man in a three-piece suit was up there. I saw him talking to her through the open window and had to turn away. You cannot fathom betrayal and hurt until it hits you. My fingers clawed the links and my body went limp and dropped like a moth caught in a web when it finally gives up. Do not care if I live or die. My sweat lubricated the iron palms. A spirit within me began to wail, long slow and rising from the caps of my knees.

And I had been so happy walking over here from my apartment like I solved the mystery of how to love and be loved. What a fuckin idiot. The rage got brighter and brighter like the earth was two planets closer to the sun, but I could not confront him. I hid in plain sight for god only knows how long. He came out into the frame of the door of her brick apartment building. He straightened up and buttoned the last two buttons in his vest. That does it.

I could have torn him limb from limb. Instead I dug my ass into the ground, motionless, between two bushes with the fence waffling my back. I don’t want to end up in jail. I uncurled my toes like a good boy and sat patiently numb …

Sorry but I could not apologize.

So sorry for her that she had such a fucked up childhood with her crazy mom and no dad because addiction stole him from her and her sister that she grew up in chaos and a rotating cast of endless bad guys and crime sprees and U-Hauls that it made her crazy and frequently hospitalized after suicide attempts and borderline on top of bipolar and on and off addicted to various things herself and money and any way to survive including falling for her goddam psychiatrist who needed his license yanked.

Nabokov crossed my mind.

She took hold and helped me up from the couch and we stood there, staring. She must have swallowed her gum. She parted my hair out of my eyes so she could look into them. She was desperately trying to see behind them and find out what I knew. She knew I knew something but I wasn’t going to tell. She would have denied it.

 “You can be my therapist until I can afford one,” I told her. “You’re good at it.”

She took it as a compliment. We both knew it was a sick idea and it wouldn’t work, and it was likely that none of this would work out in the long run. We were both used to life dead ending. But we got each other, ride or die, and that made us rich. In our twenties up against a cruel world, caught in an economic undertow, digging our heels in to keep from being sucked out and drowned.

We pressed our bodies together and pushed the carbon dioxide out of our lungs. My blood was circulating again, lubricating my pores, and my lungs filled with her scent of chamomile and pharmaceuticals. I was no longer suffocating. A warmth like embers after the fire died down. I was no longer numb. Our lips touched and I found out. Juicy Fruit. Some god has carved our lifelines and the sky is still in us.