Fingerless Gloves (12 page)

The first time James Squire had a drink, he was in 9th grade. I should know. I was there. We were sitting around his house while his parents were out to dinner. Some Friday nights held more promise than others. James’ parents would go to dinner in some far off town or even in the city. They would be gone for hours on end. Other nights were even more promising. James’ parents would go to the theater or some distant holiday party or even away for a night or a weekend. The night of James Squire’s first drink was not one of those promising nights. His parents had only gone to the Italian restaurant in the next town over; a two-hour evening… maximum. They had already been gone for an hour, and we knew the window of opportunity was closing. Mr. Squire kept liquor behind a makeshift bar in the basement. He had converted part of the family basement into a bar, with a TV and stools…some broken taps, none of it very professional looking. The bottles were ancient, with dusty screw caps and fading labels. The best liquor was kept locked up in a high cabinet in the kitchen. This was strictly for special occasions. James and I wouldn’t dare try to break into the good liquor cabinet because the chance Mr. Squire noticing something had gone missing was too great. The liquor in the basement bar, however, was scarcely monitored. It was kept in plain sight and served to houseguests who requested something off-the-grid at Squire parties.

Holding up one of the bottles, James said, “Can you believe this? The label is greasy…I think that’s the glue coming through. Do you smell that?”

The bottle smelled like Brut aftershave, my grandfather’s bathroom, and sawdust. I wasn’t even sure what kind of liquor it was to begin with, maybe brandy or whiskey or scotch. Sure enough, the glue had begun to eat away through the label, leaving said label faded and unreadable. The twist-top on the bottle was sugar-crusted closed. I guess basic science indicates that, after some time, the plastic top adheres to whatever liquor is left in the top of the bottle, creating this impossible seal. I put the bottle under my arm, bent at the knees, summoned every bit of strength I had. I twisted until the veins in my forehead criss-crossed like a road map. I felt it give just a tiny bit, just enough so that when James repeated the motion, the bottle reluctantly opened. The familiar scent came wafting out of the brown receptacle’s depths. We had smelled it before, most certainly on our father’s shirts and our mother’s jackets, and on occasion, on the breath of some of our more edgy classmates.

Considering that we were behind a bar, albeit a half-assed one, it came as a surprise to find no shot glasses anywhere. We did find generic-brand Styrofoam coffee cups, the kind used at family parties and in nursing homes. James did the honors. He poured what he figured was the equivalent of a shot in each cup. Turns out, years later, we’d realize that first drink we’d ever had equated to more like two-and-a-half shots. It tasted the way rubbing alcohol smelled…well, somewhere between that and left-open containers of makeup remover. In the movies and on TV, actors sip liquor like in a few short years there won’t be anything left to drink. They actually taste it and appreciate it in a way that I’ll probably never understand. That first drink, as I tried to swig the massive shot down my pathetic throat all at once, liquor got caught in the back of my mouth. I remember it burning, and then coming out my nose, scorching the insides of my face and finally making me cough. I reached for the open, warm can of soda that I had left on the bar.

James watched me, then took his shot, and while he didn’t cough it back up, his face twisted and contorted in foreign discomfort. After barely managing one gulp, he bent over to put his hands on his knees. I was wiping my nose off with my sleeve watching the liquor soak and streak into the fabric of my button-down. I was no longer able to smell the lingering mothballs in the basement. When I looked down at my Styrofoam cup, I discovered I still had liquor meekly floating at the bottom of it. I hadn’t finished the shot.

James instructed, “Bring the cup upstairs and we’ll throw it away outside. We need to hustle man…my parents are probably on their way back. That was disgusting. I hate everything.”

I followed James up the stairs and out his back door. The chime his mother had hung rattled as we haphazardly threw the door open and neglected it as it snapped back closed. Headlights washed over the side of the house as we lifted the garbage can lid and threw the cups inside one of the heavy bags of trash. The smell of garbage gathered and puffed out of the can as the lid slammed shut. “Shit, shit, shit, shit…c’mon,” James muttered as he ignored the sound of the lid and made a move back towards the door.

Back in the house, James opened a drawer then turned to me, tossing me a wrapped piece of gum. “Chew this…if they ask you anything, one word answers.”

The gum didn’t really take the liquor taste away, rather, it just all blended together to create a weird, wintery alcoholic blend. In fact, that night, I would find that even brushing your teeth and using mouthwash doesn’t really erase the smell of liquor breath. My sinuses were just clearing up as the Squires walked into the house. I won’t go into details, but know that we didn’t get caught. James’ parents walked in, and were off to watch television in their room upstairs. They muttered a “hello” to us, but never got close enough to suspect anything.

Over the years, I learned to like beer, and even the occasional gin and tonic. I still won’t drink anything amber or anything aged no matter how many years the bottle claims. James was primarily a beer drinker although, when he wanted to have a good night, it was always rum and some dark soda, whatever brand was lying around. When you’re young, I guess there’s some definition assigned to a person by their alcohol preference. There were so many shitty-beer nights, trying to get by on a sad mixture of watered down grain and hops. There were cheap-liquor nights too, which always ended up with incurable hangovers.

I guess some of the kids we knew, for one reason or another, became heavily invested in drinking, what it represented, socially…personally…just dealing with stuff, school, real life. We watched as, throughout high school, certain people we knew came to the forefront of this scene. Regarded as dangerous or lost, they made it a point to always occupy those strange, dark corners of our high school. When they graduated, they knew they’d be staying around, and perhaps the years molded them into being okay with that. They would drink countless beers at parties, end up yelling at a significant other, end up drawing out the police, end up trashing the house. There will always be a place for this, no matter how civilized this town ever gets. It’s a product of the animal inside each of us - an excuse to do something to excess and ignore convention and pain and appearance. When some of these same fringe characters did end up making it to college, stories would get passed along, around our coffee shops, restaurants, parks and community pool of arrests, warrants for arrests, charges sticking, court dates, and expulsion. How true these rumors were James and I would never know, but rumors always have to start somewhere with someone. To be honest, drinking wasn’t my strongest suit. I could do it well enough to look like I belonged at a party or at a bar, but I was never wholly comfortable. I’d rather casually smoke something, be it a cigarette or something more medicinal. We sipped to fit in at parties, mostly because hosts of said parties wouldn’t exactly allow smoking indoors. Out to impress any and every girl, we made it a point to look the part…and that’s as Hollywood as we ever got. We’d sip our drinks, then slip out into the night without saying a proper goodbye to anyone…briskly walking along the side of some random house, usually along the snaking tube of a discarded garden hose. Making exits…never something we absolutely learned how to do.

I heard whatever glass thing was rattling in my car clink against my seat as soon as I hit the gas. I rolled the Escape up maybe 100 yards from Nichole’s house, just enough to put me out of view, and put it in park. Under the seat, my hand blindly felt around… I caught a handful of the greasy bracket holding the seat in place. This particular model didn’t come with a power passenger-side seat, so the unfortunate soul riding shotgun still had to manually raise a beefy lever to adjust the seat. I felt crumbs and coins, a lighter, crumpled receipts, then my fingers found what had been creating the noise. Upon feeling it, cold, smooth and unbalanced, I concluded that whatever it was must have fallen out of Nichole’s bag.

A gigantic handle of vodka…I knew it the second I picked it up. Considering the weight, I was shocked that it didn’t tumble out of my hands and shatter everywhere. It wasn’t cheap vodka either. The bottle was ornate, with an engraved outline of some foreign country emblazoned on the front. This was all I needed in the middle of the night…a giant, half-empty bottle of liquor. Everything on the label was silver and shining, like some cheap toy meant to attract the most attention deficit among us. As I held the bottle up, my car parked halfway down some empty street, I wondered if I should just drink it all and put a fitting exclamation point on the end of this night. 3am was bearing down on me and the prospect of drinking half a bottle of vodka, then trying to connect the blurred road together along the half-mile drive to my house, seemed like the only logical way to end the evening.

I should have ridden in the ambulance with James. No man, woman or child should be left alone to confront the sterilized tubes and tasteless food at the hospital. His parents had to be there with him…hell, I knew his father, if it came down to it, was most likely going to stay through the night. Even fully grasping these facts, I still felt like a fuck-up…there, I admit it! There was no hint of loneliness in the air…no way things could or should ever get that bad. I should have just gone home right at that moment. These were not healthy thoughts to be having with a fist of booze and a pocked full of potent marijuana. I should have got out of the car, walked around to the curb, and placed the bottle down gently, to allow it to be preserved for some non-existent suburban bum. I imagined the bum finding it and the overjoyed expression on his or her face. Then I remembered where I was…unfortunately, no bums on that street. I didn’t want the solid weight of alcohol on my breath the next morning, nor did I want the sluggish feeling in between sober and hungover. I held the bottle for a moment, watching the little light left in the night move through the glass. It all came back - the mystery amber liquid, the Styrofoam cups, the way the headlights clearly spotted us as we stood in front of that garbage can. That handle used to be full…it was sealed and stocked, sold and wrapped…it traveled from who-knows-where to get to that party my cousin was at. I took out my phone and called Beth.

There was a moment, that second year I spent away at college, when I knew Beth Fallow had cheated on me. She didn’t have to say anything…hell, I wasn’t even physically there with her when it happened. There was this moment, part of one of the larger meaningless nights I had as a 20-year-old collegiate commuter…things slowed down. For a second, I could have sworn I saw every fiber in my parent’s couch, every pixel on the television, every bump mistakenly dried under the paint on the wall. That was the night I knew. We broke up in December, right before Christmas, but I knew something was wrong even back in the middle of that night, on my parent’s couch, in the middle of October.

To be honest, that’s why I didn’t bother getting her a Christmas present. How mean was that? Premonition cost Beth Fallow a Christmas present. That sounds like some song title. I guess her foresight wasn’t as strong. We exchanged gifts four days after the conversation that would lead us to what I call “the split.” I’m not sure how I even stomached seeing her that winter. Don’t get the facts mixed up either, there was the conversation and then, immediately following, there was the split. No time lapsed. We weren’t kidding ourselves…we were done, nothing left in that tank. She got me a
High Fidelity
movie poster…one of the original, double-sided ones that hung in the theater. I told her that her gift was shipped and had been caught up in the mail. When she asked what it was, I told her to wait for the surprise. In the months that passed, she’d ask me about her gift…over and over again. First I told her that it had been destroyed in the mail, just utterly decimated by a careless shipping person dangling packages off of the back of some truck. I promised Beth that the website I ordered from was sending a new one immediately. “Immediately” had this way of turning into the following May. I eventually just copped to the fact that I didn’t get her anything. She went on a rant about ethics, lying, gifts, apologies, cheating, bad boyfriends, never caring, and how “I was an asshole who let emotions get in the way of being anything close to decent.” I knew she was cheating. I knew it back in autumn, then in the winter it became tragic fact…I kept quiet. I didn’t want to believe it, any of it… but I knew that it was true. I knew someone was better for her than I was and it made me sick. This vague nausea and lack of appetite materialized itself into a lack of another meaningless Christmas present for Beth… Something she’d never get to unwrap or brag about to her friends. She would never get to wear that missing gift, or listen to it, or watch it, or hang it on her wall. It was something she’d never discard or put into a self-storage unit when she eventually moved out. Something that, eventually, she’d never forget.

There are so many things that get in the way of what you really mean to say at the time you mean to say it. All I wanted to say to Beth, for six months, for that whole year, was,

“Hi, you really fucked me up. You won’t be getting anything else from me…no apology, no nice, no friendly, no cordial dinners or hellos in passing. I will not accept you and your new boyfriends, or your husband, or the life you’ll build all around yourself without me. I, in turn, will roll up like a pill bug and get run over again and again just to uncoil…just to take a look at my surroundings and keep walking. Thank you.”

I never said any of that to her. At the time, it would have been a disaster. The words would have been streaming and jumbled and broken up poorly. I have the worst diction when it matters most. Thinking about it now, those thoughts seemed juvenile and short-sighted…I was a child when I conceived that rant…and it had been reworked over the course of weeks, then months. Yet, there I was, in the heart of a shit weekend, about to call her, knowing exactly what dialing those familiar digits implied.

You know, I never found out that guy’s name…the guy who was better than me for Beth’s three months of infidelity (possibly longer). What’s the use in knowing a name or a face anyway? Personally, I’d rather not associate what Beth is to me with some stranger’s face. You have all these memories and facts and experiences stored up, and suddenly there’s someone else there, potentially dissolving each one. I know who Beth is. I know all about her. As far as the guy she cheated on me with, I’d rather not know him at all. When I imagine her having sex with someone else while she was dating me, I picture the guy on top of her looking like Jude Law. He spouts poetry while he’s thrusting and flapping around. He’s a gigantic, impeccably good-looking joke. I like that thought…that picture I’ve painted over the years… and that’s the way I’ll keep it. James never understood why I hadn’t drawn out his name from fragile, crying Beth on that night a million Decembers ago. My friends wanted to know who he was, where he was from, what he looked like…and I’m not sure why. James was angrier than me, which is absolutely saying something.

Truth was, Beth and I were a perfect couple. There’s no denying that, when it came to thinking about the idea of who belonged together, we placed near the top of the list. We were impervious to meaningless high school bullshit. We were impervious to the distances between colleges. We had these incredible talks, both while fully clothed and while lying in a bed naked…there was a depth to us, like something bigger than us was resolving itself in the words we used to describe how we were feeling. Things lasted like that for months, then years, and it never seemed to get worse. That good eroded…got whittled away, piece by piece until something basic and essential had to change. Isn’t that how love and relationships always happen? I foolishly like to think Beth and I were the same people when our relationship ended. Beth was (and still is) pretty rather than beautiful. She borders somewhere on the line between pretty and cute. She has this specific handle on the English language…this mastery of words…even through her simple sentences and even when she would be swearing at me. She made the harshest words sound elegant. Her handwriting is perfect, and was probably perfect long before I met her. When it came down to it, at 3am, there was nobody I’d rather drink with…nobody else I’d be okay with seeing.