Fingerless Gloves (18 page)

The throbbing in my face, which had worsened since my high wore off, was half keeping me awake. As I lay there, somewhere in between sleep and throbbing pain, I thought about my nights over the last year. I had been everywhere…I had received and reciprocated weird snapping handshakes and pull-in hugs from guys that are as shady as they come. I had gotten looks that bordered on uncertainty and intrigue. I lost some weight, learned to live with a permanent five o’clock shadow, started shopping in different stores. When people asked about the pot and whether or not I could hook them up, usually I just said I got it from “my guy.” When they inevitably asked me to elaborate, I would tell them I couldn’t… that I didn’t do that sort of thing. Like I said, I wasn’t a dealer. In fact, getting the stuff for Streets had been the first time in over a year I had helped someone, other than myself, score drugs.

Stereotypically, and in good faith to every strange youth who had come before me, I hated my town for ten years straight…then, in about 10 months, I learned to love it again. I knew people. I knew back roads and addresses. Comfort took the place of yearning wanderlust. I started being invited to parties… and, after awhile, I actually started showing up to parties. I wasn’t following James everywhere. He had his things… trips back to his old college, different girls in different towns. We still hung out, played video games, ate at the Chinese buffet…we were the same, only better.

Sleep came at a ridiculous hour I can’t recall. The black of the apartment became the black behind my eyelids. After an epic night, the world flipped its sign and closed up.

Saturday morning came and went. Outside the few windows in my apartment, the sun rose and broke through the blinds. Saturday afternoon had just gotten underway, and the faint sounds of people walking the streets didn’t interrupt my sleep. Living on your own makes you forget standard things, like the fact that time still exists on weekends. My bones were stiff and my eyes were filled with crust when I finally rolled over to check my unset alarm clock. Over the course of the night, for some unknown reason, my landlord-programmed heater had turned on. As a result, my throat was chalky, dry and burning. The heaters were overpowering and governed by a faulty temperature gauge. In the middle of winter, when I could have actually used warmth, there was no heat to be had. A backwards luxury that, upon first learning that “utilities were included” seemed like such a blessing. My bed smelled musty and my pillows were half rumpled and folded. The decorative small pillows were in a pile on the floor. My phone was hanging, by it’s charger cord, off the end of my night table.

The phone dangled back and forth in the dead apartment air. I wiped my eyes to see it more clearly. With fuzzy vision, I picked it out of the air and woke the screen up. There were seven missed calls: six from my parents and one from Beth Fallow. I hit the “view” key and saw that most of the calls were missed during the hours of 8-9am. There were no voicemails or text messages left behind. I put the phone back on the night table and swung my legs out of bed. My feet met the end of my throw carpet and slid into my moccasin slippers. The apartment was lit up with a gray brightness. Somewhere during the course of the morning, clouds, perhaps beginning to swell with rain, moved in to block the sun out.

The first five phone calls were from my parents, the sixth was Beth and the seventh was my parents again. The last call had come in about 15 minutes before I had woken up. When someone calls that many times and doesn’t leave a message, something is amiss. Usually, when something sinister or bad is happening, the calls are frantic, with no time for messages. Usually, when something sinister or bad is happening, people leave text messages with the caps lock on. They leave breathless voicemails and will instant message you, even if the computer, with some thoughtful quote or song lyric, says you’re away. When my stiff back bent into my desk chair and I opened my laptop, there were no instant messages.

The clock read 12:30pm. I had slept right through any respectable waking hour. My pajama pants were on crooked and, before I could think about returning the calls, I shuffled around my apartment trying to scrounge up something to eat. Below me, I could hear the noise from the hardware store. There are worse things in the world than living above a busy place of retail. The hardware store kept regular hours, wasn’t really busy on Saturdays and was closed on Sundays. The owner didn’t speak much English…but, there’s the smell. The weird smells of pipe cleaner, copper tubing and various other high-powered demonstrations for customers wafted through the vents into my apartment during their busiest hours. Most times I made it a point to be away all day on Saturdays, so in turn, I only got hints of the smell at the end of the day…but, on holidays or days I’d take off from work, the smell was potent. I had to keep windows open, even in the cold.

I thought about James Squire being released from the hospital that morning. I imagined he was released very early, as hospitals tend to never let you sleep in. I figured that I’d let him sleep it off before I called him to hang out later. I wondered about Beth. At that point, I didn’t really have the wherewithal to think about the awkward car ride we’d taken to The Hitch the night before. Maybe she’d want to hang with James and I tonight…that’d be kind of nice and, given the passage of time, might just work out.

I returned my parent’s phone call. My mom and dad were biding their time…slowly trying to save enough money to retire. They talked about Florida and the Carolinas. They bought magazines like
Life of Leisure
and
South Carolina Lifestyle
. My dad told everyone that he worked too hard to still be working so hard. He and my mom had maybe another year or two left before they skipped out. I shocked myself because, even though I moved out on my own in the world, I still shared the same town with my parents, as well as with Beth, James and the majority of kids I had known or seen since I was a teenager. Who moves out in the same town they grew up in? It just seems counterproductive. You could imagine all the justifiable conveniences that come from having parents less than 15 minutes away - from free laundry to dinner leftovers. The phone rang and rang against my ear until my mother picked it up.

“Anton, are you at your apartment?”

“Yes… don’t judge me, but I just woke up about 20 minutes ago. What’s wrong?… you called… over and over for some reason.”

I could hear dishes clinking together in the background. She was walking around the kitchen while emptying the dishwasher. My sense of hearing was becoming more acute as, on the other end of the phone, chairs were pushed in and silverware was dropped into drawers. As my mom spoke to me, I started to assemble the geography of the kitchen purchased, not long ago, as a bit of a splurge for my parents. My dad had been doing well at work and decided to sink some money into redoing certain parts of the house… beginning and seemingly ending with the kitchen. There were stainless steel appliances and color-coordinated dishtowels. There were the gadgets tucked neatly into endless cabinets and the non-stick pans hanging above the island. I remember the oversized burners on the new stove and the gigantic, heavy oven door. It was a luxury my father’s mother had never had. My grandma still managed to cook extravagant meals with next-to-no kitchen technology.

“Can you come here…to the house I mean? I spoke with Mrs. Squire this morning. She called here but said she didn’t have your number at the apartment.”

Two things came to mind: the first was that I didn’t, and still don’t, have a landline at the apartment. Landlines seemed to be a thing of the past. Hell, in my apartment, I didn’t have any cable… I barely had internet access… and even my hot water was questionable. I just kept things simple. The second thing I wondered was why Mrs. Squire had called my mom. That hadn’t happened since James and I were in middle school.

“Give me a second mom. I have to shower, change… pull my life together. I’ll be over in about 45 minutes. Just hang on.” The clock read an unfortunate 1:10pm. “Just get here as soon as you’re ready.”

I was moving in slow-motion. The shower sputtered, then steamed up around my adult body. I remembered days when I wasn’t so concerned about my figure. It’s not that I didn’t care, just never really thought there was anything I could do to change my appearance. I carried an unfortunate amount of baby fat around with me through middle school and high school. I didn’t start to thin out, ironically, until my freshman year in college. I grew a few inches and stretched the pounds over a slightly longer frame. I wasn’t toned and, due to my burrito habit, still had a tiny paunch below my chest. My arms and legs had no real definition…just a crease here or a weird vein there. I had no traps or quads or tris or delts or anything else gym people have. I had what I called a “some guy” body. I was built like some guy… not jacked, not emaciated, but strangely normal and literally willing to eat anything at any time. Some would call that some sort of metabolic blessing. I knew that I was just biding my time against the forces of age, diet and gravity.

My face had settled into a dull, pulsating pain that beat in rhythm with my heart. I looked in the mirror and it didn’t look good. It appeared that the reality of what happened, that I got into a fight, was absolutely apparent at first glance. The bruise was pretty pronounced, making its presence known in deep shades of blue and purple and green circling the outside of my eye and most of my cheek. I was also cut under that same eye…nothing drastic, just more broken skin. I did my best to clean up. I patted my face dry out of the shower. Naked, I brushed my teeth, then spat some mouthwash back into the sink, washing the blue residue down the drain with water from a Dixie cup. I finished drying off. Brushing my teeth naked made me feel like a porn star or someone so important that he doesn’t have to wake up until the middle of the afternoon.

In my room, I opened the window a crack to gauge the temperature. It was warm, but the kind of warm that only lasts through the early afternoon hours, then quickly fades to cool by evening. I knew that in a matter of a few hours, darkness and jacket temperatures would return with purpose, as if they never left. As I was dressing accordingly, my phone began vibrating again. Beth’s name lit up the caller ID.

“Hi Beth… so, is everything cool, about last night and stuff? I feel bad for that awkward drop off and the drinking and stuff. It was late. I wasn’t thinking about…”

Beth cut me off and said, “Anton, stop. Have you gone to your parents yet? Can you just go there? Talk to them first and then please call me when you get a chance… I could use you.”

The concern in her voice could not be confused with a shoddy cell signal. She was actually having trouble with the words as they spilled out into the phone. Thinking back on that night, if I were to pinpoint a moment when I knew things were seriously wrong, that’d be it. Beth was always the very portrait of put together. When I was too drunk to have sex with her, or was stoned and engrossed in video games, or making her read crappy magazine articles about bands she didn’t like, she always smiled and went with it. When she wanted a fancy dinner, and I couldn’t afford it, she stayed in and had pizza. One night, when I insisted on Chinese food right after I had gotten my wisdom teeth pulled, Beth was there to get the door for the delivery guy. I never heard her lose her shit about anything, no matter how earth-shattering. Even when she was explaining the “other guy” she had feelings for and how he had “just happened to be there at school” and how it was “a mistake that taught her so much about herself” …she did a fair job holding it together. I was angry, but she had a certain firm tone… and some certain sadness. There were always the twangs of regret and disappointment, but it never overtook her tone, at least not the way it overtook her tone on the phone that afternoon.

Then things start to get extremely vivid. On the car ride to my parent’s house, I found the one-hitter and the baggie in my glove box. The crumbs of contraband and paraphernalia came spilling out. I remember thinking, the night before, that those items were, without a doubt, in my hoodie pocket. I was still driving around with some specs of pot and piece that no longer resembled anything close to a cigarette. There wasn’t even enough left to smoke. The radio, tuned to the local rock station, played the “Lunch Time Breakdown with Lisa Gazelle and Davey B.” I’m not sure why that show came on from 1-2pm. I guess it was for the burnouts that saw lunchtime as a reasonable time to roll out of bed. Lisa droned on while Davey B provided some one-liners and sound effects. As my arms and hands automatically took the turns to get to my parent’s house, the clock settled on 1:45pm.

My parents had a certain way with modesty. The outside of their house was very basic: one-car garage, asphalt driveway, simple garden, nice doormat, slightly used shingles and roof. My father did most, if not all of the needed repairs himself. The backyard had a small shed, a halfway decent fence, and a tiny patio where, if he and my mom were feeling romantic in the summer, they’d eat outside.

Inside the house was a different story. There was a sprawling kitchen table with an ornate runner and ever-full fruit basket set on top. The backsplash behind the stove matched the wall perfectly. The kitchen was covered in windows and thin curtains letting all sorts of natural light spill into the room.

The dining room was all color coordinated, with hardwood floors and an expandable, wood dining room table. On holidays and family get-togethers, I was always told to “bring the piece of the table up” …which meant the giant expansion that latched into the center of the table in order to double its size. The couches and chairs had all been reupholstered to match the paint and a mini chandelier hung directly in the center of the table. The room was all burgundy and dark wood, with some random pieces of matching artwork hanging on the walls. My mom, needless to say, missed out on a second career as an interior decorator. When we had family over for dinner or for birthdays or holidays, no matter how many people showed up, they were still dwarfed by that table. On the worst day of my life, a black and orange runner was laid out over the dining room table. It was adorned with old pictures of animals and stitched leaves. In the center was a dark wicker basket filled with fake fruit - bananas and apples mainly, and some ornate candleholders. The candles had never been lit.

The living room housed a modestly large television in a very old, very expensive deep wood cabinet. The cabinet hid the collections of home videos, decorations, pictures and various instruction manuals for all the electronics. Behind the glass doors of that cabinet were pictures of my dad golfing… my mother next to the Liberty Bell. The carpet was beige to go with the deep brown couches, faux-fur blankets and color-coordinated pillows and accents. The drapes over the sliding glass windows were custom made. The two ornately carved floor lamps and strange modern art pieces tied the whole room together. On the worst day of my life, when I unlocked the front door to the house I’d grown up in, my parents were waiting in that living room, on that couch, with the television off and the giant cabinet not making a sound.

I remember how quiet the house was when I walked in. Usually the TV or radio was on…my dad was pacing around… my mom was cooking. I wondered how long it had been since my old room was transformed into the brand new guest bedroom. The guest bedroom was such a far cry from my high school and college room, where I hung ever-changing movie posters. There was the unmade bed and the burn marks on the carpet from when I tried being artsy and smoking cigarettes indoors while my parents went out. All the posters I hung, I insisted on hammering tacks into the Stucco walls. The result, before my parents repainted, was gaping holes barely covered up by the edges of posters and pictures.

I could remember everything about that room. I remembered the first computer I was ever allowed to have on my own and the strange things I’d encounter on the internet late at night… how, in those weird days of high school, I carved “misunderstood” underneath the desk that held said computer. I remembered the nights, once I got older, when I’d think my room was a drunk haven… a safe place I could go after I got blitzed. I’d sneak upstairs, barely avoiding my parents… to blow pot out the window with the help of an oscillating fan. Sometimes, when no one was home, I’d try to play the guitar stoned. No one, except maybe Beth, knew what a terrible musician I was. Before my real life happened, I thought I’d play in some fantasy band… with my friends, touring the country. Then year after year went by and I never became any better at guitar, James quit bass, and all my friends stopped having artistic hobbies. I never really talked to anyone about the band, or actually starting it and practicing, or all the fake album titles I’d made up. I started up with the pot, for myself and with other people, and that became my hobby. I wonder whether I could have survived life in a van. Somehow I doubt it.

I walked into my quiet house, the same house that was my insulation and the only true space I called my own from the time I was a kid until I graduated college. My parents were waiting for me in the living room, where I had participated in so many “serious” talks… about high school, college admissions, breakups, deaths in the family, and plans for family vacations. Memorable talks in that room consist of my father’s “what are you going to do with your life” speech… and when my mom told me my Grandma had passed away. We shared that living room for over 20 years… which, when considering the amount of time the average family spends together, is a ton of television.

On the worst day of my life, right down to the exact worst moment of my life, I imagined Beth Fallow at home with her crazy parents. I imagined her, that morning, sleeping in, which she hated when it happened… but, for some reason, Beth was anti-alarm clock. I pictured her waking up somewhere around 11am, realizing that she’d missed an acceptable time for breakfast, and curse The Hitch under her breath. She never did like it there… just another adventure of the many adventures she tagged along on. She’d wake up groggy, pissed off, and settle on some sugary cereal, which her mom kept fresh in Tupperware rather than in the original, cardboard boxes. I imagined Beth Fallow as beautiful as the last day I saw her before our breakup, wearing a grey cable-knit sweater and jeans…always keeping things simple with her hair messily clipped up and moccasins on. Shameful as it is to admit, I loved her in those moccasins, all worn out and faded thin. She didn’t trust that beat up, ratty footwear in front of just anyone.

I walked into my living room and the first thing I noticed was my mom’s red crying face. Her cheeks were still wet when she looked up at me and said, ”Anton, your face!”

I had forgotten just how bad getting hit in the face felt. I imagine that I didn’t look great or good or anything close to presentable. The mirror that morning hadn’t lied… I was still bruised and cut and swollen and pounded like a piece of raw beef.

“Last night, I was out and someone hit me in the face with their car door… looks worse than it feels actually. I kind of walked right into it.”

My mom still looked shocked, and something was telling me it had little or nothing to do with the bruise sitting center stage on my face. She sat back and sunk into the couch cushions. I could hear a neighbor’s dog barking a few yards away…the same neighbor with two little kids and the new in-ground pool. It was weird, like I had gone blind and my senses grew more acute. I felt like I could hear the air moving and the trees aging. I felt like I could hear the pockets in the asphalt opening and growing deeper.

My dad was by no means a very warm man. He had never been… always choosing to be blunt rather than sensitive. My mother, for all her compassion, was in no shape to tell me anything important. She began to tear up again. Her eyes were burning and glassy and without any makeup. My dad finally came out and said it… the same way he had just come out and told me every single fatherly thing he’d ever said. This was the same father who taught me how to fight and match my ties to my suits… he was never very well-spoken or warm. Truth was, he didn’t finish college… and lived with more regret than he cared to admit. He was rooting for me to get a job and move out, find out about responsibility on my own terms. Of all the people to say it, perhaps my dad ended up being the most fitting and the best for the job. He was the only man I respected enough to tell me the worst news at the worst moment in the middle of the worst day of my 25 years on the earth…

“Son, I’m sure you know that last night, James was admitted to St. Claire’s Hospital…”