Probation (30 page)

What the hell were those pills? They look harmless enough, sitting here on the sink. What are these fucking things? I pop the lid and flush them down the toilet. The whirlpool makes me dizzy. One little capsule clings to the porcelain bowl, defying me. I fill a glass with water and try to swallow, hoping to restore my body to a state of grace.

The phone is screeching again. The answering machine picks up and my sister begs me to answer. She sounds as if she’s crying. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. I’m all right. It’s nothing. She keeps calling my name. Andy. Andy. Andy? She can’t hear me answering.

Where’s the phone? Where’s the fucking phone? I weave and stumble toward the bed, trying to catch my breath. Aha! There you are, you naughty little glow-in-the-dark princess. My awkward foot kicks the receiver across the floor.

Are you there? Please, are you there?

Gina’s voice is tiny, tinny, muffled by the thick carpet.

I’m all right…all right, I want to tell her, but I can’t speak now, can’t waste the effort. It takes every bit of strength I have to breathe. I can only look at the phone and gasp and heave. My throat is collapsing; my lungs are screaming for oxygen. I want to tell her bye, bye, kiddo, sweet dreams, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

Go ahead and close your eyes, I think. Sleep tight. Don’t be afraid. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m scared, but not as much as I should be. Some part of me believes this is only a dream and I’ll wake before I stop breathing.

Fuck Jesus!

I feel strong arms pick me up and carry me down the stairs.

Call 911!

I hear another voice at the far end of the tunnel.

What you say?

Call fucking 911! This man ain’t breathing so good!

What?

911! Call now, motherfucker! This man gonna die!

But I don’t.

Hours later, I’m lying in an observation bed in the emergency department. The nurse says two gentlemen would like to visit. Jerome and Nate, Bekins Moving and Hauling, stand over me, smiling, basking in the warm glow of playing God. Their names are embroidered above their shirt pockets. Nate. Nathaniel.

Merry Christmas, Nathaniel. Was Santa good to you?

I try to thank them, but it’s too painful to speak. The breathing tube bruised my throat. My hands and thighs are tethered by lines and needles. Benadryl and steroids and adrenaline have worked their miracle and brought me back to life.

Take it easy, little buddy
, Nate says,
thought we’d lost you.

I shake my head and doze off, comforted by his voice.

“You’re a very lucky fellow,” the nurse says as she hands me my discharge instructions. I don’t disagree even though it’s been a long time since I would have chosen that word to describe myself.

So I check into a hotel, seeking room service and clean sheets until Nate and Ben can deliver my mother’s bed to Magnolia Towne Courte. I decline the key to the minibar, not completely trusting my ability to resist temptation. I call my sister, then Matt. I give them my room number and assure them I’m fine, that I just need to get some sleep.

Which is what I do for three days. Real sleep without pills or booze, relying only on my own circadian rhythm. I order cheeseburgers and fries and chocolate milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When you’re paying top dollar, the staff accommodates your every need. I stare at the television between bouts of sleep. I start to feel better, stronger, almost content.

Anaphylactic shock didn’t transform me. Maybe it’s just that I’d sunk as low as I could go. Not that my little tale of woe was anything special, nothing for the record books. I’ll never experience the horrors and epiphanies of true addiction. A little heavy drinking and a few sour sexual liaisons and a chance encounter with an antibiotic with a four to five percent cross-reaction with penicillin are the sum and substance of the drama of my life.

I wish I could say that I’m seeking redemption through meditation and prayer. But the reality is I’m lying on the bed burping ground beef and onions and dozing while my Psychic Friends promise Great Revelations on the television screen.

Your loved ones are waiting to speak to you….

The Celebrity Spokesperson, all bright and shiny with red lacquer lips and shoe polish hair, speaks directly to the camera, sending a not-so-subliminal message to call the number crawling across the bottom of the screen. Apparently, my mother is beating down the fourth wall separating those who have passed and those of us still encumbered by mortal flesh and blood. And she has a message for me! All for the small investment of two dollars and fifty cents a minute.

Curiosity killed the cat and, after validating my card, a lazy voice thanks me for calling the Zodiac Hotline. The Celebrity Spokesperson, of course, is too busy with her sales pitch to channel my mother’s spirit herself. My minimum-wage clairvoyant sounds barely out of high school. Her questions are peppered with teenage slang.

So, um, like, your mom…like, when did she pass?

After twenty dollars of preparatory interrogation, my mother is ready to make her Grand Entrance. The message is simple and, though delivered in an unfamiliar voice, can only have come from her.

Get out of bed. Shower. Check out. Move on.

Good boy that I am, I obey.

S
he hadn’t needed Nancy Drew to track me down. She’d dialed my mother’s number and an automated voice provided the forwarding number, repeating it twice in case she didn’t have a pencil in hand. What’s surprising isn’t that she’s found me, but that she’s come looking.

Bobby’s wife sounds shy and awkward when I answer the telephone, introducing herself as if she were a stranger, as if I couldn’t possibly have any recollection of having spent the past Easter in her home. She apologizes for intruding; she feels terrible about bothering me. She’s calling from the Pride of Carolina Motor Lodge on the strip highway outside Chapel Hill. Her voice is tired and raspy. She says Bobby refused to come down from Watauga County; his son is dead as far as he’s concerned. The doctors told her the cuts were deep and plastic surgery might not hide the scars. She’s worried JR will have to wear long sleeves, even in the heat of summer. The television bleats in the background, noise to keep her company.

“JR asked me to call you,” she says, assuming, incorrectly, the boy and I have struck a special friendship, that I’d been sought after and my advice solicited as his only flesh-and-blood relative who’d been to college. She has it all wrong.
Robert,
not JR, has asked her to call. That much I know. What I don’t know is how Robert knew to ask for me. Did he figure it out on his own? How? Had someone told him? I ask what she wants me to do. Can you come to the hospital? she asks. I’ll meet you in the lobby tomorrow at two, I say.

The hospital is like every other, with walls painted neutral colors and spit-polished floors. The simplest question—room, please, of Robert Calhoun—seems to overwhelm the red-smocked old woman volunteering at the reception desk. The computer denied access to any information, referring her to confidentiality protocols. Flustered, she excuses herself and dashes off to find help.

“Andy.”

I spin on my heels and stand face-to-face with my cousin Bobby’s wife. She’s aged since my mother’s funeral. She’s missed her appointment with Lady Clairol and hasn’t slapped on any makeup to brighten her dull pallor. She’s not making any efforts to put a best face on things. Meeting is even more awkward than the phone conversation. She asks if I’ve eaten. I lie and say yes since hospital food still haunts my dreams. We walk to the locked unit. She introduces me to the unit clerk, then excuses herself. She’ll meet me in the lobby after visiting hours, knowing we “boys” want to talk. I listen for subtext, insinuation, innuendo, in her comment, and hear none. All she cares about is that her damaged son has asked for me and I have come.

Robert is embarrassed by his circumstances, but happy, genuinely happy, to see me. He doesn’t seem so different from the boy I shared a bed with last spring. He hardly looks to be a danger to himself, bandaged wrists notwithstanding, and no one would ever believe he’s a threat to others. He doesn’t seem to belong here, locked away with the agitated, the obsessed, the haunted, the irredeemable. After hello, I grope for words, appalled by the question that finally tumbles off my lips.

“What have you been up to?” I ask.

“Oh, not a lot,” he answers.

We sit knee to knee, talking about inconsequential things. I stumble from one faux pas to another. He squirms when I ask how he likes school. He wants to talk about me, wants to ask about when I was eighteen, his age.

“Did you ever do anything crazy? Really crazy?”

I tell him about hitchhiking alone to D.C. to see the Stones. He’s impressed. “Yeah, they were great, it was great, best night of my life,” I say, lying.

A hip-hop psych tech, not much older than Robert, announces that visiting hours are over. Robert grabs my arm and asks if I’ll come back tomorrow. He doesn’t tell me why he wants to see me. I don’t have to ask.

“If you like.”

“I’d like,” he says. When I shake his hand, he grabs and squeezes me, then breaks away quickly, not knowing how I might react, not trusting that I won’t push him away. He’s unsure of the world these days.

He’s quiet when I return the next day, absorbed in a television movie. But when I stand up to stretch, he grabs my elbow, not letting me wander from the sofa. At the end of visiting hours, he asks if I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe, I say. My minimum-wage obligations back in Charlotte are looming. Please, he says, hopefully. Sure, okay, I assure him. If Barnes and Noble won’t accommodate me, I’ll take my skills across the street to Borders.

Bobby’s wife isn’t the type of woman comfortable with tears, but the events of the past few weeks have broken her down. I’m not that comfortable with emotional outbursts either and, if truth be told, I would rather she not start crying when I tell her I’ll hang around a little longer. She’s overwhelmed by what she thinks is my kindness and generosity. I let her believe my motives are selfless. Why should I tell her the truth, that I’ve failed everyone around me, my wife, my father? Christ, I couldn’t even be at my mother’s bedside when she died. Now they are all gone and I’m alone and, if not entirely unloved, then, at least, unneeded. What twist of fate has dropped this kid in my lap? Why now? Bobby’s wife has it all wrong. Kindness and generosity have nothing to do with it. I’m doing this for me.

Besides, I genuinely like the kid. I knew the bare bones of the story. He’s eager to talk, but reluctant to be the first to speak. On my third visit, the charge nurse makes a special dispensation so Robert and I can have a little privacy. We sit quietly in his tiny room. He fidgets on his mattress and offers to change places with me.

“That’s okay. The chair’s fine,” I say. He looks at me and sighs. I’m going to have to make the first move. I make it easy for him to open his heart and pour out his soul. I confess I know all about WrestlerJoc and OnMiKnees4U, about Cary, about whom I had been both wrong and right.

“Cary, Cary, Cary,” he repeats, feeling a rush of liberation just being able to speak the forbidden name.

Cary wasn’t the dreaded predator I feared and ended up being pretty much the package presented over cyberspace—twenty years old, in the throes of first love and infatuation, the type of boy on whom Robert had harbored secret crushes since junior high. Still, just like I predicted, he ended up smashing Robert against the rocks of reality by abruptly announcing he really was straight, was only really comfortable with girls, that being around Robert now made him feel a little creepy. Maybe Robert shouldn’t call or hang around his dorm, and probably he shouldn’t acknowledge him if they happened to run into each other on campus.

This sudden change of heart happened after (and, as he will realize when he’s a little older and wiser, because) Robert, emboldened by the power of true love, placed a classified ad in
The Daily Tar Heel
, participating in some phenomenon called National Coming Out Day by sending a public mash note using his
real name
to the Love of His Life, a man, yes, a man, he identified only by the initials CAL. In a gentler, kinder world, Robert would have been allowed to quietly retreat to lick the wounds of rejection, and, over time, learn to love Cary less and less.

But, of course, fate would intervene in the form of Mandy’s older brother, the beneficiary of a UNC wrestling scholarship, who clipped the disgusting announcement from the paper, folded it, and tucked it in his wallet, saving it to share with his bitter little sister when he went home for Thanksgiving. Little sister, drunk and betrayed, threw the crumpled piece of paper in the face of my cousin Bobby when he answered the door.

To say he beat the boy to a pulp wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration. Robert crawled back to Chapel Hill that night with a black eye and facial abrasions and a sharp pain in his rib cage where his father kicked him for good measure after knocking him to the floor. The dormitory was empty except for a couple of Chinese kids who didn’t speak much English and kept to themselves anyway. By the time halls started to fill up again on Sunday, the swelling had gone down and he told anyone who asked about his eye he’d been in a car wreck, nothing broken, just knocked around a bit.

“Have you ever felt as if you were living in someone else’s body?” Robert asks me. “Did you ever touch your skin and couldn’t feel it?”

“All the time,” I admitted. “Not so much now. But it hasn’t been so long ago since I felt that way.”

He called his mother, told her not to worry, he was all right, they’d talk about it later, decide what to do, where he’d go, after exams. He stared at the open book on his desk, unable to read, not even seeing the print on the page, finally closing it. It was pointless, his father was cutting off the money and he wouldn’t be returning, at least not until he could earn some cash. Barely eating, unable to sleep, not bathing, he wandered the streets until daylight, talking to himself, he counted down the days—twenty, nineteen, eighteen—until they closed the dorm for winter break, leaving him nowhere to go.

He paced outside the library, open all night during exams, arguing with himself, swearing he wasn’t going to give in to temptation, finally losing the battle and ending up in the men’s room deep in the bowels of the building. Locking himself in a stall, he waited, not wanting sex actually but needing to feel something warm—a belly or a crotch—against his face, hoping someone would slip into the next stall and a foot would slide across the tile and nudge his, the blossoming of romance.

He sat for hours, his ass and thighs turning to cold lead, hearing nothing but piss against porcelain, an occasional turd plopping in water, flush and run. Just when he was about to give up, go home and pull the sheets over his head, he heard the sounds of procrastination at the sink, hands being washed and dried, then washed again, a brief, hushed conversation, and then belt buckles slapping the floor in the next stall. Robert leaned forward and saw suede bucks and familiar red sneakers with black racing stripes. His knees buckled and his stomach heaved when he stood to pull up his pants. He tripped over his own feet, cutting his chin on the edge of the door, and, bleeding, ran as fast as he could, away from the banging and thumping and hands slapping the stall, from the grunting and groaning, from Cary’s voice, begging the boy in the suede bucks to do it harder, go deeper, harder.

He waited until nine in the morning when the dorm was empty. Then, alone in his room, he slipped a pocketknife in the pocket of his robe and walked the corridor to the shower room. Once the water was scalding hot, he pulled the shower curtain behind him and slashed first his left wrist, and then, before he passed out from shock, gouged his right, not as prettily, but effectively. The blood came in spurts and the last thing he remembered was it swirling around his feet and disappearing down the drain.

“I didn’t think about killing myself. I just wanted to feel something, something that hurt. But I didn’t want to kill myself, you’ve gotta understand,” he says, shaking my arm, pleading with me.

“Why?” I ask him. “Why is it so important I understand you?”

“Because no one else does.”

“Why are you so sure I do?”

“Mandy told me,” he says. “She said you were a fag. I thought about you all the time after that. I wanted to talk to you so bad. I almost called you, but I was afraid.”

The shrink thinks Robert would benefit from intensive therapy and the medications might need to be adjusted, but the insurance won’t approve any further inpatient treatment. Bobby’s wife panics. Robert cannot go home. The hospital can’t keep him just because he has nowhere to go.

I haven’t finished making the offer before he accepts. I explain my spartan existence and warn him his feet will hang off the couch. More permanent plans can wait until after the holiday. Who will follow his case? Who will make the doctor’s appointment? What about school? What about the lost semester? How he will pay his tuition? And the dormitory. Will they take him back? How can he face all those well-scrubbed little Tar Heels who last saw him being carried out the door by paramedics? It’s not my problem. After the new year, I’ll send him packing, bus ticket in hand, destination unknown.

Much to my surprise, my prison cell at Magnolia Towne Courte seems larger, not smaller, when he takes up residence. It’s strange, how much we have to talk about, this eighteen-year-old kid and me. He wants to know everything about me. No, not everything. He’s not interested in my life with Alice. He’s only curious about the life he and I share. He assumes I was always what I am today. Which I was. Only I didn’t know it. No, more accurately, I didn’t
want
to know it. He wants to know about my first time.
What did he look like? Was he nice? Did you love him?
No, I certainly wasn’t in love with a long red snake. But I don’t share that with Robert. He’s still a boy, impressionable, and, after Cary, his faith in his fellow travelers is too precarious to withstand the sordid little tale of my rape by a nicotine-stained stranger in the cab of a tractor trailer. So, instead, he’s enthralled by the tall tale of the First Time I wished I’d had. Like Baron Frankenstein, I assemble this chimera from bits and pieces—part Randy T, part Brian Wilkins, a dash of the Rocket Boy, a bit of Steve, even a trace of Douglas. I christen my fantasy first love “Nick,” inspired by the Beach Boys Christmas song on the radio.
Surely, you’ve got a picture of him? Somewhere,
I lie,
I’ll look around.
I dig out an old photo album I hadn’t put in storage and chose some long-forgotten young Nocera Heat and Air technician captured for posterity at the annual summer picnic to cast in the role of Nick.

He uses me as his sounding board for his theories and opinions about everything and anything. The debate between genetics and environment. The theory of dominant mother/absent father. Why Lou Reed, despite overwhelming evidence of his heterosexuality, is a better role model for gays than Elton John. I make mental notes, checklists, of all the things I want to tell him in our short time together. Soon enough, it will be time for him to be thrown back into the harsh world. He puts up a good show of bravado, but I know he’s afraid to venture out there alone. He reminds me of a boy I once knew, a kid who dreamed of conquering the world, but chose safety and security over Chicago. I don’t want Robert to retreat like I had; I want him to be strong and fearless.