“It makes it easier to hide the rooster blood when they have their Santeria rituals up the block. They paint all the neighbors’ houses. All the neighbors they like, that is. It’s a sign to the evil spirits to pass our doors by.”
“Like the angel of death passing the houses of the Jews during the tenth plague, the one that had the firstborn being sacrificed.”
He frowned at me. “You couldn’t tell I was just kidding? Stop lying there. Come inside.”
I got up. In a lot of ways his place reminded me of the house I used to have. Books and movie posters everywhere, DVDs stacked all over, boxes full of comics, the occasional action figure or some other little toy that might have helped to inspire a story.
We sat at his kitchen table. He leaned forward, enmeshed his fingers, stared at me, and said, “You’ve hit the wall.”
“The wall hit me.”
“You can stay here for as long as you like.”
“Thanks, but I’m out with my brother on Long Island for the time being.”
He’d met my brother at my wedding, and had already read through the thinly veiled portrait of him in my stories. “That going to work out all right?”
“For a couple of days anyway.”
“And what about after that?”
“I don’t know.”
I was saying that a lot. It had become my mantra.
“Okay,” he said, “so tell me about it.”
I told him about it. I started about eighteen months back and went straight up to carrying the last of my shit into the pawn shop. I started to explain about the crank kids and the gun and speed loader and my crooked nose and the girl at the fast food window, the flood, the pie, my first love, the security guards in their little booth, all of that, but the closer I got to discussing it the heavier my chest felt. It was as if a steel band was constricting my chest, cinching tighter and tighter.
I skipped it all and went straight to my brother, the celebrity mag, the bath, the shelf of photo albums, my old man washing the car, my mother’s disappointment by the time she held up my third novel, the agent scared, the way he should be, the bolted bookcase.
Somewhere along my discourse he got up and started to brew some tea. Whenever my voice began to rise and become too shrill he’d say, “Shhh, shhhh.” Once he came up behind me in my chair and began to massage my shoulders. His touch nearly made me leap up and scream.
We drank the herbal tea. I hated herbal tea. People put too much fucking faith in herbal tea, like if the Chinese knew all the mystical zen secrets of the universe then why the fuck were they still communists? I spun the cup around on the saucer a few times until he told me to swallow all of it. I swallowed all of it. There were no tea leaves in the bottom for me to read.
“You’ll feel better soon.”
“Tea just punches me in the bladder.”
“The tea doesn’t matter. I gave you some lithium.”
“Lithium?” I stared into the empty cup. “You spiked the tea with lithium?”
“Yeah. Just a little. It’ll help you to relax.”
“No it won’t.” I’d studied up on anti-depressants for one of my books featuring a schizophrenic bi-polar hitman. Then again, when I got on them the first time. Then again the second time. Then again, when I couldn’t afford them and wanted to know what side effects withdrawal would put me through. “It takes up to a month for treatment to become effective. And it’s used in conjunction with other drugs.”
“I put some Prozac and Xanax in there too.”
“Christ, man, can you mix those together? You couldn’t have just picked up a six-pack? How’d you get all these drugs?”
“Stole them from work,” he admitted.
“Can you just drink this shit?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? Oh Christ.” I was so angry I almost kicked him in the shin. “You really aren’t properly trained to medicate people, are you.”
He shrugged. “It can’t make you feel any worse, can it?”
He had a point. My vision began to cloud and double up. I fought to keep control. I didn’t know why. “You have really shit communication skills, you know that? It’s why you like women who can’t speak the language. So they don’t notice how badly you relate to people.”
“The language of love is all that two people truly need to understand each other.”
“You say crap like that and you think I need the lithium?”
“You do.”
My head started to lift off my shoulders. I stumbled for the couch.
“I think it’s starting to hit.”
“Good, just go with it.”
“But I don’t want to go with it. Don’t you get it? I don’t-”
“Shh, you’re already unconscious, you stubborn asshole. Now shut up and sleep.”
I glared at him and cursed at him, then I shut up and slept.
I woke up in my underwear with my face pressed to the large bosom of a naked fat woman.
She smelled of stale cream and Kahlua and was gripping me so tightly that I was having trouble breathing. I huffed air like a paint sniffer and tried to extract myself. I couldn’t. I tried harder.
The woman moaned in her sleep and said something that sounded like Russian. I was sweating nervously and finally was slick enough to slip out of her clench.
I took a whiff of myself. I was ripe but I didn’t smell like sex. My clothes were folded in a carefully laid out pile on the floor. I got dressed and went downstairs.
My pal was sitting on the floor in front of the television, shelling pistachios and watching a martial arts flick. Tiny Asian guys were flying around on wires smacking each other silly. Every guy seemed to love this shit.
“You’ve been out for almost forty-eight hours,” he said. “You must be starving. There’s a pot of fresh chicken soup in the fridge. Get yourself some.”
I did. I ate a bowl as we watched the movie, oohing and ahhing over the very cool stunts. I got myself another bowl and then a third. When I was finished I asked, “Hey, why was there a woman in the bed with me?”
“That’s Katya.”