Chapter 11 #2
HE LIVES IN A HAND-ME-DOWN PENTHOUSE AND I LIVE IN A CARDBOARD BOX.
“Angus, I make ten bucks an hour.”
“You broke into my house.”
“Only to impress a girl. I mean, you get that. You know how it is.”
“You opened a 1949 Chateau d’Yquem.”
“We can grab you a bottle.”
“It’s a ten-thousand-dollar bottle of wine, Jimmy. And it’s my favorite.”
CRACKHEADS CAN’T BE WINE SNOBS. “I’m sorry, Angus. If I knew anything about wine, I never would’ve opened that bottle, and if I had that kind of dough, I’d get you the galley and the wine, but it really is that simple. I don’t even have a checking account.”
“It’s not about money, Jimmy,” SAYS THE RICH FAT PIG as he pulls the Band-Aid off his belly button and chews on it. But I’m no better. Why didn’t I just offer you a Heinie? “You know what my sober companion would say about you….”
HIS SOBER COMPANION IS A FIGMENT OF HIS FUCKING IMAGINATION.
“Angus, I don’t have twenty-four hundred dollars.”
“So put it on a credit card.”
“I don’t have a credit card.”
“Well, that’s for the best, Jake. Don’t get a card, and if you do, go with Amex. Or Discover. But pay it off every month. Your dad will chip in because all dads know about interest rates…. A kid like you, Jake…”
MY PARENTS ARE NOT THOSE PARENTS.
“Good tip, Angus. Thanks. Cool.”
The living room is sinking, fast. I didn’t think it through. Angus is on his feet. He’s roaming around looking for an orange, so he doesn’t get scurvy (help me), and he settles for a crack pipe and sighs.
“This is it, Jimmy. The moment it all changes for me. After I burn The Twenty-Seventh City, I’m going back to rehab…
.” BULL FUCKING SHIT. “And not that dump in New Mexico. I’m doing it right.
Going to Promises…. You know what they say.
” I don’t like the way he pauses, the way he becomes my own private Joker.
“You don’t go forward until you hold yourself accountable, Jackie… .”
He tosses his pipe to fuck with the CD player and again, the doves are crying.
“So true,” I say.
As he dumps coke on Prince: “In rehab, you learn about manning up….” He does a big fat line and shakes his head, and I swear moths are in the air now. Tiny ones. “You broke into my house, and you say you’re sorry, but those are just words.”
“Angus, I can’t…I can’t pay for the book.”
He grins and says that’s not his problem and I am not the only living boy in New York City.
I AM THE STUPIDEST FUCKING BOY IN NEW YORK CITY.
NO ONE IS CHEAPER THAN THE RICH. Breathe, Joe, breathe.
He does another line and the doves are crying, and I don’t have it, Vail.
I don’t have that kind of money. I want off this ship.
Now. I snap my fingers the way people do when they get the big idea, the big idea that came from you.
“How about this, my man? What if I work it off? The twenty-four hundred bucks. I can be your assistant.”
He stares at me like he isn’t scratching at another Band-Aid dangling from the pubes sprouting out of his filthy boxers. “I don’t need an assistant. I’m going to rehab.”
NO, HE FUCKING ISN’T and he’s still wearing your scarf, and he says he has business to deal with—no, he fucking doesn’t—and the hallway is longer than it was when we got here and I tell him I have no money.
No savings. I tell him about the box again.
I’m living in a box…I’m living in a cardboard box.
He eyes my shoes. “Converse?”
I nod, and he huffs like Converse is Hugo Boss. “Think of it as your first Maine summer.”
Oh, fuck you, Angus. Fuck you. “My what?”
“Your first Maine summer, Jimmy. Mom and Dad left me in the Maine house alone when I was fifteen or fourteen. All the help was gone. I had to do it all—make my breakfast, flush the jobbies…This is how the boy becomes the man. Seriously, Jack. Have fun with it.”
With that, he calls the elevator and pushes me inside.
“Oh, Jimbo,” he says. “If you don’t survive your first Maine summer, if I don’t get that Franzen before I go to rehab in two weeks, if you forget to cover the pool when it rains and it floods the patio…Ever been to juvie? Ever seen a pool overflow into the game room?”
He tosses your scarf at me as the walls close in.
Outside, I puke warm Dutch piss as the gargoyles scowl from above.
4:46 a.m. I dial your number. Voicemail.
I call your landline. Answering machine.
Serves me right. I can’t go to you. I don’t know where you live, but the walk helps.
I did what you wanted. You asked me to rescue your scarf, and I came through.
I bring it to my nose. I remember your hands on me.
You want me. You still do. This scarf is not special.
It’s from the Gap. You hid it because girls do that.
You leave a little something behind so you have a reason to come back.
Girls are like crackheads. You don’t let go.
I’m no different—I think it’s why I don’t have a posse—and I am Gollum in the good way. I tell it to the world, the homeless guy talking to a trash can, the drunk girl crying with her friend. I shout the way you can in New York at five a.m.
“I love you, Vail Colorado Gunderson!”
Stone cold red hot truth right there. My life is a wreck.
An eccentric monster just gave me two weeks to earn more than I make in a month.
I could lose my job and the clock is ticking and my nose is running in the predawn freeze, but here I am with the biggest shit-eating grin of my life.
It’s the Jimi Hendrix of it. Growing louder by the hour, by the second.
I don’t fucking panic over mundane real world stuff, not anymore.
Worries are smaller because of you, my waterfall.
I’m actually happy that you opened the 1949 Chateau d’Yquem and I’m happy that you unzipped my fly.
Hell, I’m even happy that you had your period.
I want to go to war for you, Gundylocks. I kiss your red scarf. I’m ready.