Brett and Leslie: Chapter 15

Drat!

A few weeks later, it was already getting cool outside, and I still hadn’t found a new job to replace the one I lost in jail.

I looked at the paper to see if they were miraculously advertising any good jobs.

Nope.

I thought about starting over in yet another dishroom.

My next thought was “It’s time to go buy Boone’s Farm and pour vodka in it.”

I put the Humpers cassette in my fake Walkman, head down, and held it together till I got to the liquor store and back. I snuck through the half-gone front door—hanging from the frame by one hinge like a punched tooth clinging to the gum—to find all my remaining roommates waiting in the living room: Leslie, Brett, and—we couldn’t believe he had the nerve to come back, but his parents had finally posted bail—Paul the Asshole. Mouths open, cups in hand. It was like they had smelled that I was trying to treat myself.

At first, I wanted to slap them all—I needed every drop of that liquor myself, and every drop had cost me twice as much blood and sweat. Even Brett got paid five times what I did, and most of the time he was standing around.

But who else was going to distract me from the horrors in my head? Living in The House had isolated me like an abusive girlfriend—I had lost touch with all my friends who were even marginally functional, falling into the black-hole whirlpool. I hadn’t realised how depressing they were till I was too depressed to get away from them; they were a habit, and they came with chemical habits as well. None of us had sex anymore, with each other or anyone else, unless Leslie was drunkenly groping some teenager the rest of us had failed to protect.

There was no thing that could distract me, either: no Internet yet, not unless you were rich; it was mid-week and there were no good punk shows, even if I could afford to go out; the cops had finished off the televisions, I didn’t have the money to spend on a new book, and you needed a car to get to the nude beach.

The only other thing I had to do while I drank, besides talk to these assholes, was to think about starting over.

So, like a mother goddamn bird, I poured my blood into their cups. Being Brett, Brett gave me a dollar for the wine and had his own bottle of vodka.

But they were going to listen to me complain, dollar or no dollar, son of b!tch:

Four-fifty-five an hour plus leftovers—plus a shift drink if it was a bar, maybe two if the bartender found me entertaining: This was the rate of pay in the furnace room of a restaurant. Your perquisites were the foul water that came up through the holes in your Chuck Taylors, the stench of used food and Microquat (a disinfectant we fondly called micro-tw@t, which for some reason I never felt was a micro-aggression against me; this is why I’m not rich), sharp knives left carelessly in hidden places by the well-paid waitresses, premature carpal tunnel syndrome, and the nagging feeling that maybe—if this was the best I could do in life, despite being able to learn anything I wanted as long as it only involved a book, plant, furry mammal, concept, system, or machine—any addition of human beings made the whole thing almost mystically incomprehensible—I was suffering from a social retardation so incurable and profound that I might as well drink myself to death as fast as my overly sensitive stomach would allow.

It took a couple of hours of drinking for me to articulate any of it, though. I stared in silence, trying to get the “this is why I drink” feeling again, listening to Leslie brag about how great our band was going to be one day. For the first rising crescendo of the vodka, I followed his flights of delirious aggrandisement, thinking:

Yeah… maybe we WILL play in Milwaukee someday!…

But then:

He’ll have to learn to memorise at least A line of lyrics, though.

And:

I wonder if we’ll ever play that song I wrote? Maybe I should have another band. But where would we ever practice? I know these guys would steal the equipment. I wonder why Paul hasn’t stolen our shit already?

And finally, I made them pay:

“Goddamn it!” I slurred. “I was in JAIL, how was I supposed to get to work!?”

Brett clucked sympathetically. He had chipped in, like I said; Paul and Leslie were drinking faster than either of us, though, and we couldn’t seem to get rid of them. Not even when I began to cry. “Well, don’t get so drunk you miss your other job tomorrow. Didn’t you get a raise there, too?”

“Not yet! And it’s only 25 hours—I need another job! It’s hopeless! Can you get me a job as a bellhop?”

“Can you lift a suitcase that’s bigger than you are?” Brett said.

“Augh! I’m too small for the man jobs, and I hate people too much for the woman ones.”

“It’s rough,” Brett agreed. “But it could be worse.” He sneered, trying to laugh: “At least someone didn’t burn your life’s work to the ground.”

“Oh my gawd, are you never going to talk about anything else as long as you live?” said Leslie. “You’re such a crybaby! Wahhh, wahh, wahh. My stupid pictures got burned in a mishap that was totally cleared by the police. Accidents happen!”

“ACCIDENTS!?”

“You can’t prove anything,” Leslie gloated.

“Do you somehow not realize that you’re basically admitting you did it?”

“I can’t believe my best friend would accuse me of an actual felony!”

“I can’t believe the police in Manty are so incompetent, you could outwit them.”

“They aren’t any worse than the Madison drug squad,” I said bitterly, gesturing toward the pile of wainscoting and light fixtures that was still in the middle of the living room. “Hey, Paul, your lawyer was here again the other day. F@cking bigger douchebag than even you… anyway, he told me—you wanna guess how much money they spent drug busting our house?”

“Is it more than my dad spent on that stupid lawyer?” Paul sulked.

“I dunno—did he spend ten grand? Yeah! TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!* Overtime, extra guns, surveillance… I dunno, codpieces…That’s what these assholes spent to get me fired and wreck the house. Ten grand! Looking for f@cking Tony! Thanks for bringing him into The House, Paul. God, I wish I could kill you and not get the chair.”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

“Oh, you f@cking liar. Don’t give me that hang-dog sh!t. You love your disgusting scammer life.”

He reached for the vodka.

“DON’T YOU F@CKING DARE!! God, you hog. Let me at least drink enough to stop feeling.” I grabbed the bottle and punched back a good five bar-measure shots, gagging.

“Jeez, Lucy. Take it easy, you’re the one you’re gonna kill.”

“So? What else am I supposed to do? I don’t get free money for anything. I can’t even get paid! God damn it… I can’t start over! I’m so sad, vodka isn’t working! VODKA ISN’T WORKING!”

I took another shot and almost vomited, but I still felt the same. “What the h@ll? Alcohol isn’t… enough!”

“Sorry,” Brett said. His teeth were grinding together, but that was sincere for him.

“Why? Wasn’t your pot. What did you do?”

He sighed. “Yeah… come to think of it. Never mind.”

I didn’t know how cocaine worked, yet. We didn’t do it again after the arson night, but Brett knew: That’s why the vodka wasn’t doing it anymore.

“I’m so sick of working my @ss off and not knowing what to do. I can do any job, it’s not like most people are that smart, but I don’t know how to GET the job. They all say you need experience. So how do you get experience?”

“You lie,” Paul broke in. He was gripping another new bong. He shrugged and lit it.

“How would you know?!”

“I dunno, Lucy. He’s pretty great at lying.”

“I mean, about the job.”

“Oh… right,” Brett said. He was swatting with his hands like flippers, trying to defend his vodka from Leslie. “Well, I know I lied. That’s how I got my job. I said I worked at a fancy hotel in Manty.” Brett giggled. “How did they not know there’s no fancy hotel in Manty? People are stupid.”

“Not as stupid as me. I can’t even lie.”

“Of course you can lie.”

“Technically, yeah, but it always ends up with a nosebleed. I told myself when I was a little kid that I was never going to be like—”

“Have fun washing dishes then!”

“Shut the f@ck up, Paul!”

“Jesus, OK, but how else do you think you’re ever—”

“Pay your rent, shithead.”

His loose mouth worked for a few seconds. “I have to pay my lawyer!”

“Your dad pays your lawyer!”

Why couldn’t anyone credible have ever given me advice? I desperately needed to know how to do things in this awful world. But even when I happened to get one true sentence out of a broken clock, I didn’t know which ridiculous statement the true one happened to be…

It was then that my brain decided to think about my last attempt at a love affair. That did me in. Like I said, I hadn’t really had my heart broken yet, but I sure thought I had. I threw the empty wine bottle at the wall and drank the vodka like it was water.

The next morning, I woke up with a horrible rotten pain in my upper thigh—like it was infected.

“Why does my leg have a fever?” I croaked at the ceiling. The sun was high; it was warmer than yesterday. Which was inconvenient, since I was as hung over as I had ever been in my life. Everything felt hot—especially my leg. I couldn’t remember anything after the Boone’s ran out. Just that the vodka wasn’t working.

Chumpy whirred and squeaked.

“Aw… I’m sorry, little dude. You thirsty? You’re thirsty. OK.” After a few false grabs, I got my hand around his water bowl. “I guess you’re hung over too.”

I shuffled towards the bathroom sink. I drank from the faucet, voraciously. I looked at my ugly face in horror. Drank more water, filled up the Chump’s little bowl. Then I looked at my leg.

“What the ever-living…”

My leg looked like censorship rejects and hamburger.

“PAUL!” I yelled. “WHY DOES MY LEG SAY ‘TARD’ ON IT?!”

Like I said a few chapters back, “the r-slur” was already a word you were kind of afraid to say. So… why was the shortened, even more offensive, version staring up at me, carved half-an-inch deep into my leg?

After some elephantine stair-thumping, Paul’s stupid head popped around the corner cheerfully. That was one of the annoying things about potheads: As shitfaced as they got, they never seemed to have a hangover. Even if they got drunk, they had pot for breakfast and suddenly they were OK. And I was suspicious already: Generally, it required some kind of bait to get him up those stairs.

“Hey, don’t worry! It doesn’t say ‘tard,’” he said, grinning. “You’re just looking at it in the mirror, lush… it says ‘Drat!’ See—there’s the exclamation point, at the end.” He wiggled his finger at a bloody slash. I looked like a horror movie. “The exclamation point doesn’t go before the beginning, unless it’s in Spanish.”

I squinted at him. “O-K… so why does my leg say ‘Drat!’?”

“Because I carved it with Brett’s X-Acto knife,” he said, even more cheerfully.

“WHAT?!”

“Hey, hey!” He waved his hands defensively. “You told me to do it! I swear! Brett can back me up—you even told me to rub cigarette ash in!”

“WHAT??!!”

“Well, you were really depressed, and I told you when I get really depressed I get a tattoo, because the pain is, like, endorphins and stuff, so you started to try to give yourself a tattoo, but you kept dropping the scissors, so…”

“I had this idea myself?”

“Weeeeell…” He traced his sneaker in a circle. “I’m not gonna lie, I did kinda enjoy it. The sound your flesh makes when it tears in front of the knife…” He licked his lips at the happy memory.

“I can’t believe you would admit that.”

“Hey, I gave you a free tattoo! Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

I looked mournfully at the remains of my limb. I felt guilty, like I had murdered a child. It looked like a lot of big, ugly mouths, some of them still drooling blood. Lined with black ash. I could see inside of me. I needed some Bactine. And a … pill of some kind. I leaned against the filthy sink.

“Look, I’m not a complete psychopath: You can see how the A is cut really deep, but by the time I got to the D, it was really hurting you, so I didn’t cut all the way to the muscle.”

“So I have a SHITTY tattoo,” I said.

“Ya get what ya pay for.”

“Drat spelled backwards is tard,” I said sheepishly. I felt too stupid to be very angry. I had considered screaming at him, but the mere thought of it gave my head a shooting pain.

“Atta girl,” Paul said, patting my shoulder. At least he didn’t pat my leg. “I think we’ve all learned something today. You could still buy me some pizza, if you—”

“NO, I CAN’T!!”

“OK, OK.”

*By 2024, 10,000 1990s dollars would have been nearly 25 grand after inflation.