Still Crying

A car parked in the parking lot, not ten yards away, blasting Kanye West’s “Bound 2”, and it poured through the open window of Alex’s apartment. 

“Bound to fall in love.”  

A daddy long-legs on the ceiling looked down at the whole maudlin mess in embarrassment—Alex writhing on the mattress, its sheets mostly undone under him, sobbing in a big gasping way: clutching his chest, wailing and kicking his skinny legs around.

“Uh-huh, honey.”

At Bertie’s apartment he had unfolded his little heart.  Now here he was in consequence, with some animal taken over.

Out on the street, he swallowed enough of Bertie’s pills so as not to feel anxious and to be sending out the air and image of normalcy—his anxiety and this image being very interrelated.  There was something about her mysterious opioids that made him emotional.  He was also eating from the unmarked bottle in which she had mixed her downers up with melatonin.  It looked like children’s cereal.  He ate both in equal measure, pill for pill.

It was dusk or twilight or crepuscular or whatever it’s called when the sun’s going down over the horizon.  It was right at that moment when the sun was winking at him.  He appeared to be on some slope, the pavement in perverse abstraction and the sun there a white dot winking in and out of view.

Alex clomped around in his work boots in a city of some increasingly notable distortion.  People passed slowly out of shops, into the sweaty end of summer days, when any rational human being might find some peace.  This made it especially important that Alex not draw attention to himself.  This winking sun though had set in a bit of a calm and he felt at a kinship with his neighbors, in the ease of the heat, in some cosmic way.  He had all the awkwardnesses of a person constantly strung out—too tired and preoccupied to engage in the minutiae of any given interpersonal exchange.

He had first met Bertie through some old college friend.  And then they kept bumping into each other.  At bars and such.  Then she started showing up where he worked as a bartender.  He found the way she was always stuffing pills into her mouth had at first flattened her, in his mind, to a cartoon character.  Always popping pills in.  And in this way she had endeared him.  Somedays she buzzed, others she drooped.  Once in a blue moon she’d have yayo, and they’d go into the bar’s bathroom together.  This was how they’d got to knowing one another.

Walking into the bodega near his apartment, he cut off a group of teenagers.  The counter was right next to the door and they came in a minute later and poured rainwater that had collected in a container on the curb down his back as he was trying to buy some tallboys for the walk.  He mouthed, “What the fuck,” to the Yemeni kid behind the counter and looked at him with the big-rimmed saucer eyes of a cat.  It was a grotesque sight—to see a man debase himself in such a way, to posture like a kept animal.  But why should it have been debasing for him to show his true colors?

He whipped around and wailed indiscriminately.  His shaggy shit-wet hair flipped back and he howled moonward like the wolf, and the teenagers jumped back in their own ‘what the fuck’ moment—flinging stream after stream from the top of their Gatorade at him like it was holy water.

He clomped off, abandoning the idea to brown bag beers.  He remembered the last time he had seen Bertie and the state that it had put him in.

He had gotten off of work early and they sat at his bar’s outdoor patio.  There was something wrong with her.  A mood.  Something.  It unnerved him not to see a drink in front of her.

Bertie said what is wrong with you? 

He didn’t know what she meant. 

What she meant was how he was nearly 30, going after a person her own age, wearing clothing that was too tight—making him Frankenstein-like considering his height and pudginess, and looking, generally, like he was having an anxiety attack while suffering from meat sweats.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, hunkered down on the wooden table, on the little stool—his head somewhat forward, then, in alternation, aimed straight down at the tabletop.

“Tell me,” she said, “what was the worst thing you remember happening to you as a kid?”  She had clearly been thinking about this herself.

“Hrm,” he said, straining even more then to make himself smaller—to turn into a ball, maybe.  “I do not know.”  He strained to conjure images of his mother and father.  Of his one brother.  Trying to separate actual scenarios from situations on television that had seeped into his consciousness, coming out with only hazy images of them standing in his childhood home or some local establishment.  Hearing only vague sentiments, sentence fragments and names and signifiers and inside jokes that not only did not mean anything but were perhaps complete fabrications.

He drank from his beer.

She told him about an incident in which she had spent half of a day locked inside of a closet, her parents’ argument outside—approaching and moving farther—creating a horrible din of which there was infinitesimal respite and no escape.

“Oh,” he said, “wow.”

Was that all he had to say?

One night Alex had taken Bertie across town to his apartment.

There were guys who would sit on folding chairs on the corner—which he was walking past now.  When they walked past the guys that sat on the corner—outside the abandoned building on folding chairs—a lewd, sexual comment was made and directed at Bertie.  Alex was already tense—he and Bertie had broken up ten times in the half hour walk from her apartment to his—and when the comment was made and the two of them stood near to the men he felt truly overwhelmed.

He stood rigid and still, staring forward at no one.  He shook almost imperceptibly like a vibrating dildo.

“It’s fine, Alex,” Bertie had said.

Alex began making a high pitched noise, which became increasingly like the bleating of a goat and he grabbed his head in his hands, massaging his temples, while doing it.

“What the hell,” one of them said, slowly.  They leaned back in their chairs as if to distance themselves.  They were formerly relaxed and unprepared.  The smell of the blunt they had just finished smoking still hung on the corner.  A younger guy got up and was moving a few paces back rotating his body away and then towards the cacophony.

“Uh, what?” he said quietly.

“I don’t like this,” someone said.  A half-minute had passed of Alex noisily vibrating.  Bertie stood there, arms crossed, tapping her foot, looking around in low anxiety.  She placed a pill in Alex’s mouth and rubbed his throat like a dog until he swallowed it.  Then he started blubbering big tears, still vibrating in the middle of the block.

He did not know if Bertie would let him in, but if Bertie did not let him in he had one of her keys.  Bertie had multiple sets of keys.  She was always losing keys, leaving them places, so she had made many sets. Every other week she would pop one of her pills and go to the hardware store a block over, give a man money and come out with a dozen keys—their jangly sparkle in her hands a promise of something unobtainable in morning’s dim light, where she might awake alone and sober and radiant, staring at the ceiling, or worse, with Alex’s doughy form fetal next to her.

Bertie lived a half-hour walk from Alex.  The subway route necessitated a train transfer and took longer than walking.  He was too antsy to wait for the bus.

Bertie lived only blocks from her college campus.  Intimidating college students, radiating sex and opinions, milled in that area.  It put a fear in him that he would be bullied like a child—like he’d be suddenly cast in some pubescent anxiety dream, the kids all laughing and pointing, him struggling to catch up with even the basic details of his occurring humiliation.

Though he now, by some divine grace, lived in an apartment on the same block as the bar he tended, he had spent years tumbling from one living situation to the next.  Compared to Bertie’s apartment, a lush luxury condo not ten blocks from her college—beautiful amenities: a giant stainless steel refrigerator, a stove with gas burners, a chandelier lighting the den, video intercoms between the apartment and building doors, a soaking tub—his was just a shack.  His was a mattress and a kitchenette.

The neighborhood drunk, a man of indeterminate age—as he was wearing sunglasses always, and a crooked Yankees cap—and slightly shorter than Alex in height, appeared astride Alex down the street.  Alex was familiar with this man who would forget Alex’s name every time he approached Alex, which had been many times by now.

“Hey, man, slow down.  Slow down, man.  Listen, let me talk to you,” he said.

Clomp clomp clomp.

“Do you know what my name is?”

“Terry.”

“Oh, I see—so you’re familiar.  You new around here?  You live around here?”

Clomp clomp clomp.

Terry began mimicking Alex’s toy soldier-like gait as he strode beside him.  Terry continued to do so.

“Hey, you know who you look like,” Terry said while keeping in rhythm with Alex’s movement.

“Clint Eastwood,” Alex said, his voice cracking slightly to a higher pitch as he said it.  Terry had said it before.  Clint, Dirty Harry, Million Dollar Baby, The Outlaw Josey Wales.  Alex had spent time staring aimlessly at himself in the cracked mirror of his home, straining to see any resemblance, and then, also fruitlessly, to find some sort of meaning or trenchant insight in the comparison.

“That’s exactly what was on my mind.  Have we already been acquainted?  Hey man, not so fast.  How do you move your big body like that and still move so quick, huh?  Where are you going?  You look like you got something in your eye.  You all right?  Come on, slow down… Hey… All right man…”

Alex rifled through his pockets looking for earbuds, thinking to keep his mind clear of Bertie by playing music.  He found a Christian pamphlet someone must have shoved in his hands weeks earlier. Images of his own childhood, of being implicated in life’s misery, quickly faded as he thumbed through it. Painting the black void of his head was now only Bertie in bed in a negligee. 

His feet stomped on forward.  He stared absently at the pamphlet as he flipped through it, his mouth open.

He couldn’t remember if the negligee was something she really owned, but it was her bed—a student’s bed, pushed up against the corner wall and the dirt on the edges of its bottom sheet hidden only fractionally by shadow. 

When her facial features formed completely in his mind, into an expression she would never make, the dissonance caused the whole picture to drop and he realized he was walking—about halfway there now, past the community pool fenced off by twenty-foot concrete.

He started trying to formulate what he was going to say when he arrived at Bertie’s.  He thought he would say something about middle school.  He might talk about how the children mocked him. But as he dredged these memories up they meshed indiscriminately with episodes of Full House, Boy Meets World, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Golden Girls (his father might have wandered into the living room once or twice, ambiguously drunk, standing five or ten feet behind him, repeatedly asserting, “These are girls’ shows.  These are shows for girls,”) Family Matters, Happy Days, That 70’s Show….

He remembered the television itself.  Encased in wood paneling, the speaker strip below it, the cat warming itself on top of the cable box above. Nights and days spent sitting in front, absorbing the radiation.  Though he also knew that he didn’t really know this—the nights and days in themselves actually, fundamentally, inextricable from images he had absorbed from television, or movies on television, of children sitting in front of televisions.

He dug in his pocket for his cereal in the pill bottle.

He thought of an incident from middle school.  He had come into class in the winter as a Gore-tex orb like George Costanza or the little brother in A Christmas Story.  When he removed his hat from his head his hair would be a birds’ nest.  There wasn’t enough time for his hair to dry, between getting out of the shower and his mother shoving the knit cap on his head.  Arriving in class, he removed his hat and exposed his hair, and some girl whose name he did not remember but whose image was perfectly stored in his crystalline shame stood up and said,

“Don’t you ever comb your hair?”

And all of the children laughed at him.  When Alex looked at the teacher he was laughing a bit to himself, before he quieted everyone.  If it had stopped there it would have been much better, but the teacher went on.

“We all have bad hair days.”  It was the perfect time to launch into a moral lesson.  The teacher got down on one knee, knelt next to either Alex or the girl.  Was he remembering this from somewhere else?

Wherever it was from, it was getting to him.  A tear or two streamed down his face, aimed crooked down at the pavement, as he clomped further towards Bertie’s apartment.

Bertie had put down her copy of Mrs. Dalloway—it was lying next to her on the bed.  She had to read it for class but she liked it all right and it wasn’t hard to get through or anything.  She was watching some crap on her laptop, drinking a beer.

She wished she had weed.  She had spent the better part of the day trying to get some.  She had gone to the bodega on her block, where the young guy who worked there sold it under the counter.  He kept telling her to come back later because there were always too many people there.   Bertie alternated between a zombie stare and something more amenable to maintaining their relationship, in low anxiety as people milled about the store behind her as she stood at the counter.  He called her “sweetie”.  Finally, the third time she went back he said that he didn’t have any, some problem with his supplier.

Did he just not have any the entire time?

Also, she was missing one of her bottles of pills.

The buzzer rang.

Bertie got up to check. 

Even on the little black and white screen of the intercom, Bertie could see the tension in Alex’s body—the anxiety that he radiated.  Before she could make up her mind, he had entered her building of his own accord.  She cracked open her apartment door and went back to her room and sat in bed, facing her doorframe.

Then he was standing in it, all sweaty and smelling like shit.

“Um, do you have my pills, Alex?”

There was something Bertie should know: when Alex was in middle school he was crying and whining all the time.  Because he hated the people in the middle school.  Because they did not wish to interact with him.

“Should I know this?” Bertie said flatly.

Alex began to moan. A steady “Uh” at moderate pitch cracking every so often into Tarzan holler.  He was gripping his head.  Standing off frame in the doorway, his body slightly obscured before Bertie looked back at her computer.

The show she was watching on her laptop ended and it still hadn’t stopped.

“Please go,” Bertie said, looking over again.  He was now rocking in the corner by the front door, clutching his head.

She unseated herself from her bed and walked over to him.  She pushed the vacuum cleaner over to him.  There was an unplugged lamp in the other corner, and she brought that over too.  A few throw pillows from her bed.  A box fan.  A space heater she got when the central heat had stopped working the previous winter.  Then she noticed the large unopened package that had come for her earlier in the day, on the island in her kitchen. 

When a number of things had been used to cover him it still did not make to adequately dampen the sound.