Some words that coincide with some life.

Portrait of a Void

1

He is leaving.

His legs are sternly planted in the carpet of my bedroom as he sets a hand on my legs, which dangle from the edge of the bed like a wind chime. He persuades me to cease my clanking limbs – it’s serious. Mom sits to the left of me, and if it weren’t for the creaks of my mattress I would forget she is there.

“I’m going away for a little bit.”

That’s it?

The prickles of his face scratch my cheek as he leans toward me. I squirm, unable to ignore the cactus his beard has become. He hugs me too tight.

He left.

His legs were sternly planted in the carpet of my bedroom – the only stability he provided in the fifteen years since he left. In an extremely selfless act, Mom sat to the left of me, just a foot or so away from the man who chose addictions to powder and pussy over her. Ten years later my mother would find the ability, while aided by wine coolers, to admit to a coke addiction that my conception had cured. But he, on the other hand, decided partying and parenting were easy to juggle, and did so simultaneously. When it came down to doing lines at the dinner table, it was time to keep it outside of the house. Apparently, that meant inside of another woman. He fled, playing tag on the way to the courthouse and won. He got there first, and the divorce is still incomplete.

2

Red Halo

He is always late to pick me up, but today he is so late that the sun has fully set and Mom had to plead with my pre-school teacher to take me home. The door is shut, and just as the lock is in place, his big dirty white work truck screeches and clanks through the parking lot. Words are not exchanged and I am swiftly placed in the front and only passenger seat of the truck. The floor is made of bottles and cans and I can see my breath in the air as it wraps around my head, the only thing separating me from the windshield in the event of a crash. We glide through the only red light and when we reach our complex the truck slithers across the parking lot, greedily resting over three or four spots.

Before we reach the door his head finds a place against the concrete slab at the entrance. I cry after noticing that the halo around his head has stained the concrete red. He takes his hand from his head and in an attempt to lull my cries he cakes my new favorite dress with his blood. I wrestle with the front door and somehow make it through both that and the door to our apartment on the second floor. I make it back outside and he still lies sprawled across the ground. I pillow his head with paper towels, brushing curls and sweat from his forehead.

Red Horns

He was always late to pick me up, just as he was always late coming home. I think he was a factory worker, or at least something along those lines, and he would blame the dark, perfectly round blemishes around his neck on “work”. Some days he’d blame the pinch of a machine, other times a bruise from a falling box. But Mom is not deaf, dumb, or blind – not deaf to the “love yous” that had ceased, not dumb enough to ignore the ample time he began spending with the neighbor, and not blind to newly adorned hickeys that did not stem from her lips. Though she didn’t tolerate the idea of sharing her husband for long, I still can’t decipher which is a heavier burden – living a real life soap opera or cutting the cable chord. My mother chose the latter, giving her husband an ultimatum, which in turn drove him away. Though he didn’t get far – I’m pretty sure he landed somewhere in the suburbs of my city – he never found his way back.

3

Ninety Degree Tears

It’s been five years since he left. Me and Mom sit in a parking lot, housed in a used Subaru. Regardless of its white exterior the sun seems to collect in the black tar and injects through the car, swelling the interior with heat. I hang from the window like a puppy and though the car is still Mom pulls on the back of my overalls in fear of a collision with the ground. Her bright pink nails dance on the steering wheel, click-clacking like an obnoxious clock. I stare into the brick wall parallel to us. The wall radiates heat even more immense than the tar, shooting right into my eyes and frightening every bit of moisture that had nestled in the cobwebs of my tear ducts since I was three. I can’t decide if I’m gasping because my face is drowning or because Mom is holding me so tight. She pleads with me, yearning to know what’s wrong.

“I miss Dad.”

She admits that she does too and I can breathe again.

Teapot

It was five years since he left and I had never cried just as he had never called or visited or sent a fucking birthday card. Sometimes I resent the fact that I had virtually no relationship with my “real dad” but on the other hand I’ve found comfort knowing that his severe absence helped me to simply forget that you’re “supposed” to have more than one parent. I don’t know what came about me that day. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe all of the tears that should have been shed on lonely nights or empty Father’s Days sat in my belly waiting to be pushed, and it took a sporadic July afternoon for them to finally boil over. I never cried for him again, not until finding a high school boyfriend who mirrored him with white powder and burnt spoons. I’m sure I subconsciously seek aspects of him in the men I kiss and date and fuck and it’s not fun to wake up, naked legs entwined with a reminder of a man I don’t even know. I’ve tried ridding myself of this spell called “father” but I’m coming close to the realization that my contentment with him will remain just as hollow as his place in my life.

Recovering from an Addict

The siren screeched, begging surrounding vehicles to make way for the ambulance. His whole body twitched and his tongue fell from his lips but somehow, in the chaos of uncontrollable spasms, his eyes lay still in my direction. A stream connected my eyes to my chin, dripping onto his shaking hand as he reached for mine.  I’m not sure what hospital we ended up at but by the time we arrived his face had gone blue.

The previous night was date night. Just as we prepared to hit our usual dinner spot, Don Giovanni’s, Ken began complaining of chest pain. His (literally) crazy brother was living with him at the time and had just been prescribed some new “chill the fuck out” pills. Ken, too dizzy to leave the couch, had me fetch the pills.

Creeping into his brother’s room I could feel my heart thrashing against the inside of my chest. Prescription bottles decorated the entire surface of the dresser. What if I picked the wrong pills? There was no time for deliberation and Ken urged me to hurry. The roar of his voice charged up the stairs, gripping onto the hairs on the back of my neck – “I think they’re the blue ones!”

Back downstairs I attempted to read the words on the bottle. Before I even had a chance to fumble on the second syllable he snatched it from me, but his shaky hands could not conquer the cap. I ended up feeding him the pills.

“I think that’s enough. What if you don’t leave him any to get through the month?”

“Come on baby, just one more.”

I was probably twelve the first time I laid eyes on Ken. I had made friends with a local metal band, Zee Docta, and Ken happened to be the bassist of their brother band, Strik-9. I never spoke a word to the man and frankly, I never intended to. He was short, fat, and bald which conflicted entirely with my twelve-year-old vision of the perfect man (tall, slight beer gut, greasy long hair). Needless to say his presence never crossed my mind.

Then the MySpace craze happened, and one night I found a friend request from “Handsome Ken”. He compulsively filled my inbox until I finally agreed to spend a day with him. I spent the night before our date with Dennis, my best gay at the time, and gossip over the new twenty-nine year old in my life consumed our conversation.

At sixteen I cherished three things: irony, “individuality”, and the taboo. So far I had conquered the first two with a best friend decked in pink (she juxtaposed perfectly with my all black exterior) and some holes in my face (safety pins through skin easily masked boredom with blood). When Ken came along he slid easily into my taboo void.

I wore our relationship like a badge, always bragging about the bars I’d been snuck into and the older crowd I’d been surrounded by. Those first three months were spectacular. He didn’t really call me his girlfriend but it was okay – he made up for it when presenting me with a new set of drumsticks on Valentine’s Day. I rebelled against labels my whole childhood so why did I need one now? Especially after spending a night with legs and lips intertwined I just knew I was something special to him. Actions do speak louder than words, right?

The ambulance incident occurred about a month after he took my virginity. After downing the pills he figured a nap would cure the shakes. I nestled up next to him but couldn’t fall asleep due to his trembling body. He finally pointed to some dollar bills on the dresser and told me to go out, get some lunch or something. I didn’t want to leave him alone. The convulsions would sometimes become violent, but only for a minute. I contemplated the worst-case scenario – a violent one hits that he can’t control, he falls off the bed, hits his head hard on the side table, passes out, and dies. He called me stupid and told me not to come back for an hour.

I refused to go further than just across the street to the Dunkin Donuts. Munching on a bagel, I called my friend Steph. I had known this girl for years, since we were about eight. After her brother got locked up for miscellaneous drug and theft charges, her mother lost control of the family and Steph began spending a lot of time at our house. We were inseparable.

I explained Ken’s symptoms – chest pains that run down his arms and legs, shaky hands, random convulsions – baffled at what sickness could have overcome him. It was crystal clear to Steph.

“Sabrina, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Ken’s on drugs.”

Her accusations stung, tearing right through my throat and ripping out my vocal chords. The shell of a girl who was supposed to be me sat in Dunkin Donuts talking on the phone with a girl that was supposed to be my best friend, that was supposed to comfort me in a time of need instead of throwing around absurd claims. Steph never liked Ken, and now that he was sick it only made sense that she would jump at any opportunity to make him look bad and drag me away from him. I wasn’t having it.

I stormed back to Ken’s house to find him all smiles watching TV. “Ready for dinner?” The shaking had stopped. Of course he wasn’t on drugs, it was a simple illness cured by a decent nap. He whisked me off to Don Giovanni’s and we lived happily ever after for a couple of hours.

After dinner I called my mom and fed her the usual, “I’m sleeping at Angela’s, see you in the morning” act. Once she bought it we sped back to his place and rushed right upstairs. Clothes off, spit swapped, flesh on flesh, and then we called it a night.

I woke up sometime around 4 A.M. to an empty bed. I found Ken downstairs sprawled out on the couch, shaking and drenched in sweat. After pleading for him to return to bed I had already grown used to the convulsions and fell right to sleep.

After a few more hours I woke up and he was out of bed again. It was finally time to call 9-1-1. I rushed toward the door as they packed him into the ambulance but his brother, Shaun, caught me. Shaun was known for three things: his tourettes, his addiction to crack, and his love of being naked. He guarded the front door in nothing but boxer briefs, his belly hanging over the waist band with the words “40 Ounces to Freedom” etched in the skin. I could feel his breath on my face when he begged for a clue as to what was happening.

I could barely decipher between Shaun’s words and the sirens. I tried ignoring him and reached for the door but his final plead shot from his mouth like a slingshot to my ears:

“Sabrina, what the fuck did you take?”

You.

I tried shaking off the sting of the assumption that I, too, was an addict, and climbed into the back of the ambulance just as they buckled Ken into the stretcher. We took off and I buried Shaun’s words with tears as I watched Ken’s face go blue.

At the hospital I was shoved in the opposite direction to which they took Ken. After finding the waiting room on my own I attempted an exchange of words with the man behind the desk. He muttered something from behind a newspaper and shooed me in the direction of the seating area.

Ken’s father arrived first, then his mother and stepdad and finally followed by his brothers Mike and Shaun. Before their arrivals I had strived to make it back to the ER. Although the man at the desk assured me that absolutely nobody was allowed beyond the double doors, his father gained easy access.

A routine began with each person’s visit. They’d breathlessly storm in, slither back into the ER to get a look at Ken, and then march in front of me to begin the interrogation. “What did you take? Where did you get it?” By the time of my fourth interrogation my eyes had swollen and tears had to take a running start to make their way out.

The questions piled on my chest until they began drowning his family as well. My spotlight finally dimmed and the questions ended but they were not followed by silence. Question marks were stomped out by periods and the statements stung worse. His dad returned from a third trip behind the double doors to make announcement: “Just go home, he doesn’t want to see you anyway.”

My tears transformed into steam, giving me the energy to fire back some periods of my own. I refused to leave without seeing him and packed all of my frustration and sadness and the last bit of energy from a (barely) five hour night of sleep into two letters – “No.”  They finally let me behind the double doors.

I don’t know what I felt when I sat beside his bed. His tongue seemed to find comfort outside of his mouth and nestled against his chin in a bed of spit. His face was no longer blue – it had no tone at all. He reached for my hand but I didn’t reach back. He shed a tear but my ducts didn’t reciprocate. We sat in silence and within minutes a nurse came to wheel him off for “tests”.

Though this would be my last trip to the ER it was not my last collision with drugs. In the two and a half years I spent with Ken he had relapsed five times, entered three rehab facilities and experimented with suboxone – a pill that masks the craving and blocks the effects of opiates – twice. As I write this Ken has been sober for almost six months – his longest period of sobriety in eighteen years. In a letter from his last stint in rehab he acknowledges the fact that he put me “through a bunch of bullshit and really fucked [me] up” but goes on to say that he can’t dwell on his effects on me or else he’ll never stay sober.

At first I was pissed. Telling me that you’re sorry you fucked me up is not enough to mask the fact that a barely sixteen-year-old girl had to play housewife to a thirty-year-old drug addict. You can never bury the site of seizures, syringes, and a house without spoons. And although it’s been so easy for me to accept the fact that I had seen these things, it’s taken three years for me digest the information.

When a person battles addiction it is a lifelong battle. I learned in AA that a person with only a day of sobriety and a person with forty years of sobriety both have one thing in common – they are an addict. They always have been and always will be an addict and the only thing they can do is stay sober one day at a time. I’ve been battling my crisp memory of that day for three years and I will battle it for many more. Though I don’t think I can ever accept Ken’s apologies I can finally accept the fact that it happened – I got fucked up and I have to live with the memory for the rest of my life. All I can do it take it a day at a time.