The man looked past me, his eyes groping toward the red and green neon sign with its neatly bunched neon palm trees that glowed behind the bar and apprised everybody of the name of the establishment. It took him a minute, but then he dropped my hand and said, “Just call me Jimmy.”
After a couple of drinks at a bar, after the subjects of sports, movies and TV have been exhausted, people tend to talk about liquor, about the people they know who drink too much, fly off the handle, wind up wrecking their lives and the lives of everyone around them, and then they tend to get specific. This man—Jimmy—was no different. Alcoholism ran in his family, he told me. His father had died in the streets when he was younger than Jimmy was now, a transient, a bum, useless to the world and, more emphatically, to his wife and children. And Jimmy himself had a problem. He admitted as much.
A year before, he’d been living on the East Coast, in a town up the Hudson River, just outside of New York. He taught history at the local high school, and he’d come to it late, after working a high-stress job in Manhattan and commuting for years. History was his passion, and he hadn’t had time to stagnate in the job like so many of his fellow teachers who went through the motions as if they were the walking dead. He loved sports too. He was a jogger, a tennis player, a mountain-biker, and he coached lacrosse after school. He was married to a girl he’d met in his senior year at the state university at Albany. They had a son—“Call him ‘Chris,’” he said, looking to the neon sign again—and he’d coached Chris in high school and watched him go on to college himself as a newly minted freshman at an Ivy League school.
That was all right. Everything was all right. The school year began and he dug out his notes, Xeroxed study guides, looked up and down the class register and saw who he could trust and who he’d have to watch. In the mornings, before it was light, he ate breakfast alone in the kitchen, listening to the soft hum of the classic rock channel, the hits that took him back, hits he hadn’t heard in years because Chris always had the radio tuned to hip-hop or the alternative station. Above him, in the master bedroom, Caroline was enjoying the luxury of sleeping late after thirteen years of scrambling eggs and buttering toast and seeing her son off to school. It was still dark when he climbed into his car, and most mornings he was the first one in the building, striding down the wide polished halls in a silence that could have choked on itself.
Fall settled in early that year, a succession of damp glistening days that took the leaves off the trees and fed on the breath of the wind. It seemed to do nothing but rain, day after day. The sky never swelled to flex its glory; the sun never shone. He saw a photo in the paper of a barechested jogger on the beach in Key Biscayne and felt reality slipping away from him. One afternoon he was out on the field in back of the school—the lacrosse team was scrimmaging with a bigger, more talented squad from a prep school upstate—and he couldn’t seem to focus on the game. The assistant coach, no more than three or four years out of school himself, stepped up and took over the hectoring and the shoulder patting, managed the stream of substitutions and curbed the erupting tempers—discipline, that’s what Jimmy taught above all else, because in a contact sport the team that controls its emotions will win out every time—while the clock ticked off the minutes to the half and the sky drew into itself and the rain whitened to sleet.
The sticks flashed, the players hurtled past him, grunting and cursing. He stood there in the weather, a physical presence, chilled, his hair wet, yet he wasn’t there at all. He was reliving an episode from the previous year when his son had been the star player on the team, a moment like this one, the field slick, the players’ legs a patchwork of mud, stippled flesh and dark blooming contusions. Chris had the ball. Two defenders converged on him, and Jimmy—the coach, the father—could see it all coming, the collision that would break open the day, bone to bone, the concussion, the shattered femur, injury to the spinal cord, to the brain. The sound of it—the sick wet explosion—froze him so that he couldn’t even go to his son, couldn’t move. But then, a miracle, Chris pushed himself up from the icy turf, stiff as a rake, and began to walk it off.
Jimmy awoke to the fact that someone was tugging at his arm. “Coach,” somebody was saying, Mary-Louise, the principal’s secretary, and what was she doing out here in this weather, the sleet caught like dander in the drift of her hairdo that must have cost sixty-five dollars to streak and color and set? “Jimmy,” she said. “You need to call your wife.” Her face fell, the white pellets pounded her hair. “It’s an emergency.”
He used the phone in the history chair’s office, more weary than anything else. Since Chris had left home, everything seemed to set off alarm bells in Caroline’s head—she thought she heard a sound in the front end of the car, the telephone had rung three times in succession but nobody was there, the cat was refusing to eat and she was sure it was feline leukemia because she’d just read an article about it in the local paper. And what was it this time—a furtive scratching in the attic? Mold eating at the caulking around the tub? He thought nothing. Stared at the crescent of white beach on the marked-up calendar tacked to the wall behind Jerry Mortensen’s desk as he dialed, and wished he could feel some sun on his face for a change. Florida. Maybe they’d go to Florida for the holidays, if Chris was up for it.
Caroline picked up on the second ring and her words burned a hole right through him. “It’s Chris,” she said. “He’s in the hospital.” There was no quaver, no emotion, no cracking around the edges of what she was trying to convey, and it scared him. “He’s in the hospital,” she repeated.
“The hospital?”
“Jimmy,” she said, and her voice cracked now, snapped like a compound fracture. “Jimmy. He’s dying.”
Dying? An eighteen-year-old athlete with a charmer’s smile and no bad habits, heart like a clock, limbs of hammered wire, studious, dutiful, not a wild bone in his body? “What was it,” I said, sounding tinny in my own ears, because his pain wasn’t mine and there was no confusing the two. “Car crash?”
There had been a fraternity party the night before. The streets were slick, power lines were down, rain turned to ice, ice to snow. Chris was one of twelve pledges at Delta Upsilon, a party-hearty fraternity that offered instant access to the social scene, and it was the pledges’ responsibility to pick up the party supplies—beer, vodka, cranberry juice, chips and salsa, and bunting to drape over the doorways of the big white ocean liner of a house, which had belonged to a shipping magnate at the turn of the last century. None of them had a car, so they had to walk into town and back, three trips in all, over sidewalks that were like bobsled runs, the snow so thick it was coming down in clumps, and somebody—it was Sonny Hammerschmitt, twenty-three years old and fresh from four years in the Navy and the only one of them who didn’t need fake I.D.—suggested they ought to stop in at the Owl’s Eye Tavern and sneak a quick beer to get in the party mood. Chris tried to talk them out of it. “Are you kidding?” he said, a cardboard box bristling with the amber necks of tequila bottles perched up on one shoulder while cars shushed by on the street and the intermediate distance blurred to white. “Dagan’ll kill us if he finds out.”
“Fuck Dagan. What’s he going to do, blackball us? All of us?”
A snowball careened off the box and Chris almost lost his grip on it. Everybody was laughing, breath streaming, faces red with novelty, with hilarity and release. He set down the box and pelted his pledgemates with snowballs, each in his turn. Directly across the street was the tavern, a nondescript shingled building with a steep-pitched roof that might have been there when the Pilgrims came over—ancient, indelible, rooted like the trees. It was getting dark. Snow frosted the roof; the windows were pools of gold. A car crept up the street, chains jingling on the rear tires. Chris threw back his head and closed his eyes a moment, the snow accumulating like a cold compress on his eyelids. “Sure,” he said, “okay. Why not? But just one, and then we’d better—” but he never finished the tho
ught.
Inside, it was like another world, like a history lesson, with jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage lined up behind the bar, a display of campaign buttons from the forties and fifties—I Like Ike—and a fireplace, a real fireplace, split oak sending up fantails of sparks against a backdrop of blackened brick. The air smelled sweet—it wasn’t a confectionary sweetness or the false scent of air freshener either, but the smell of wood and wood smoke, pipe tobacco, booze. Sonny got them two pitchers of beer and shots of peppermint schnapps all around. They were there no more than half an hour—Dagan Drava, their pledgemaster, would really have their hides if he ever found out—and they drank quickly, greedily, drank as if they were getting away with something. Which they were. The snow mounted on the ledge outside the window. They had two more shots each and refilled the pitchers at least once, or maybe it was twice. Chris couldn’t be sure.
Then it was the party, a blur of grinning, lurching faces, the music like a second pulse, the laughter of the girls, the brothers treating the pledges almost like human beings and everything made special by the snow that was still coming down, coming harder, coming like the end of the world. Every time the front door opened, the smell of it took hold of you as if you’d been plunged in a cold stream on the hottest day in August, and there would be two girls, two more girls, in knit hats pulled down to the eyebrows and scarves flung over their shoulders, stamping the snow from their boots and shouting, “A beer! A beer! My kingdom for a beer!”
Time contracted. One minute Chris and his pledgemates were scrambling to replenish the drinks and snacks on the big table in the dining room, everything reeking of spilled beer and tequila, as if a sea of it had washed through the house, from the attic on down to the basement, and the next minute the girls were gone, the night was settling in and Dagan was there, cracking the whip. “All right, you dogs, I want this place clean—spotless, you understand me? You’ve got ten minutes, ten minutes and all the trash is out of here and every scrap of this shit off the floor.” The rest of the brothers were standing around now, post-party, working on the keg—the ones who weren’t off getting laid, that is—and they added jeers and head slaps, barking out random orders and making the pledges drop for twenty at the slightest provocation (and being alive, breathing and present seemed provocation enough).
Like any other healthy eighteen-year-old, Chris drank, and he’d tried just about everything at least once. He was no angel on a pedestal, Jimmy knew that, and drinking—the taste for it—ran in his blood, sure it did, but in high school it was beer only and never to excess. Chris was afraid of what alcohol would do to him, to his performance on the field, to his grades, and more often than not he was the one who wound up driving everybody home after the post-game parties. But here he was, dense with it, his head stuffed full of cellulose, a screen pulled down over his eyes. He moved slowly and deliberately, lurching behind a black plastic bag full of wet trash, fumbling with the broom, the dustpan, listening for Dagan’s voice in the mélange of shouts and curses and too-loud dance music as if it were the one thing he could cling to, the one thing that would get him through this and into the shelter of his bed in the windowless room behind the stairway on the second floor.
“Wait a minute, what’s this? Hey, Dagan. Dagan. You see this?” It was the guy they called Pillar, a senior who wore a perpetual look of disappointment on his face and was said to have once won the drinking contest at Harry’s Bar in Key West by outlasting a three-hundred-pound Samoan through sixteen rounds of mojitos. He was holding up two still-sealed bottles of Don José tequila.
Dagan’s face floated into the picture. “I see what you mean, bro—the place just isn’t clean, is it? I mean, would you want to operate under these conditions?”
“Uh-uh, no way,” Pillar said. “Not while these motherfucking bottles are sitting here. I’m offended. I really am. How about you, Dagan? Aren’t you offended?”
Dude. That was what they called the drinking game, though Chris had never heard of it before and would never hear of it again. Dude, that was all, and the whole house was chanting it now, “Dude! Dude! Dude!” Dagan marched the pledges down to the game room in the basement, made them line up against the back wall and handed each of them a shot glass. This was where the big-screen TV was, where the whole house gathered to watch the Pats and the Celtics and the porn videos that made your blood surge till you thought it was going to keep on going right out the top of your head.
It was 2:00 a.m. Chris couldn’t feel his legs. Everything seemed funny suddenly, and he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to bring it all up, the beer, the schnapps, the pepperoni pizza and the chips and salsa and Cheez Doodles, and his pledgemates were laughing too, Dude, the funniest thing in the world. Then Dagan slipped the video into the VCR—Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—and gave them their instructions, serious business now, a ritual, and no fooling around (“I’m serious, people, and wipe the smirks off your faces—you are in deep shit now”). Music, a flash of color, and there was Keanu Reeves, with his slice of an Asiatic face and disappearing eyes, playing the fool, or maybe playing to type, and every time he uttered the monosyllabic tag that gave the game its name, the pledge class had to lift the glasses to their lips and down a shot—“Hey, dude; ’S up, dude”—till both bottles were drained.
Benny Chung was the first one to break. He was seventeen, a Merit Scholarship finalist, with narrow shoulders, wrists you could loop two fingers around and a head that seemed to float up like a balloon from the tether of his neck. His shoulders dipped forward as if he were trying to duck under a low-hanging limb, then his lips pulled back and he spewed all over the floor and his pant legs and his black high-top Converse sneakers. It was a heroic effort, so much of that umber chowder coming out of so frail a vessel, and Benny had to go down on one knee to get it all out. Nobody said anything, and nobody was laughing now. Up on the screen, Keanu Reeves said the magic word, and all the pledges, including Benny, hammered another shot. Benny couldn’t hold it, though, and neither could Chris. Chris saw the look on Benny’s face—the outrage of an entire organism and all its constituent cells—and he remembered his own legs buckling and the release the first wave of nausea gave him, and then he felt nothing more.
All the Delts were swarming the room now, expostulating over this disgusting display, this pathetic showing on the part of a pledge class that wasn’t worthy of the name, and hands took hold of Benny and Chris, people shouting and jostling, the whinny of laughter, cries of “Gross!” and “Don’t get any of that shit on me, man,” the hands finding purchase at armpit and knee. They laid Benny and Chris side by side on Chris’ bed, then thundered back down the three flights of stairs to the game room. Half an hour went by and both bottles of Don José were drained by the time anyone thought to look in on them, and another ten minutes elapsed before Dagan Drava, a premed student, realized that Chris wasn’t breathing.
“So he was drunk,” Jimmy told me, the band into their opening number now—blues, they were doing a blues tune that seemed vaguely familiar—“and who hasn’t been drunk? I’ve been drunk a thousand times in my life, you know what I mean? So I figure, all the way up there with Caroline hyperventilating and what-if-ing and driving me half crazy, that we’re going to walk into the hospital and he’ll be sitting up in bed with a sheepish grin on his face, one hell of a headache, maybe, and a lesson learned, but no harm done.”
Jimmy was wrong. His son had choked on his own vomit, inhaled it, compromising his lungs. No one knew how long he’d been lying there in the bed next to Benny Chung without drawing a breath before the E.R. team restarted his heart, and no one was sure of how much damage had been done to his brain functions. A CT scan showed edema of the brain tissue. He was in a coma. A machine was breathing for him. Caroline went after the doctors like an inquisitor, relentless, terrifying in her grief. She stalked the halls, chased them to their cars, harangued them on the phone, demanded—and got—the top neurologist
in New England. Chris’ eyes never opened. Beneath the lids, like a dirty secret, his pupils dilated to full and fixed there, focused on nothing. Two days later he was dead.
I bought Jimmy a drink, watched myself in the mirror behind the bar. I didn’t look like anybody I knew, but there I was, slouched over my elbows and a fresh drink, taking in air and letting it seep back out again. The woman with the deep-dredged laugh was gone. A couple in their twenties had settled into the vacant spot on the other side of Jimmy, oblivious to the drama that had just played out here, the woman perched on the barstool while the man stood in place, rocking in her arms to the beat of the music. The band featured a harp player, and he moved round the confines of the stage like a caged animal, riffling the notes till he went all the way from despair to disbelief and back again, the bass player leaning in as if to brace himself, the guitar rising up slow and mournful out of the stew of the backbeat.
“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Jimmy said. “I’m out here in California having the time of my life.” He pointed a finger at the rain-streaked window. “All this sun really cheers me up.”
I don’t know why I asked—I was drunk, I guess, feeling maudlin, who knows?—but I said, “You got a place to stay tonight?”
He looked into the shot glass as if he might discover a motel key at the bottom of it. “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “Or on leave, actually. I was staying with my brother—up on Olive Mill?—but he got to be a pain in the ass. Caroline couldn’t take it. She’s back in New York. At least, I think she is.”