Last Night I Sang to the Monster (2 page)

And me, I’m sitting there with my bottle of Jack Daniels. I don’t know if I’m happy or not. But maybe I
am
happy because I’m watching Antonio and Gloria.

And then we’re talking to each other and Gloria says, “Zach, where are you from?”

And I say, “I don’t know.”

And Antonio asks me, “Where do you live?”

And I say, “I don’t live anywhere.”

And they look at each other and then they start having a conversation in Spanish. And I wish I could understand because it seems like they’re saying such beautiful things to each other. And it seems like they’re becoming one person, like they belong to each other—and I don’t belong to anyone. That makes me feel sad. I’m crying. I can see Gloria and Antonio. They’re happy and they’re talking and they’re beautiful. They’re beautiful like the sky and the desert and the ocean. And me? I’m not beautiful. And I can’t talk. And I can’t understand anything.

I’m seeing the whole scene. Happy Antonio and happy Gloria. And sad me.

I drink and drink and drink. Until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

I hate dreams almost as much as I hate remembering.

I had this plan. The plan first entered my head when I was in the first grade. I was going to make nothing but A’s. I was going to get a scholarship and go to Stanford or Harvard or Princeton or Georgetown or one of those famous schools where all the students were very smart. And very happy. And very alive.

Something went wrong with my plan. Shit.

If Mr. Garcia could only see me now. Mr. Garcia, he was a very cool guy. He was young and smart and he was real. Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes. I get it.

But somehow Mr. Garcia escaped the monster named
fake
. He had this really cool goatee and he wore tennis shoes and jeans and a sports coat and he always wore white shirts that were a little wrinkled and, well, I really liked the guy. He had the friendliest face I’d ever seen. And he had really black eyes and hair so black it was almost blue. His voice was soft and clear and he made people want to listen. “You have to respect words.” He said weird and interesting things like that. He memorized poems and recited those poems to us out loud. It was like his
whole body
was a book—not just his head, but his heart and his arms and his legs—his whole body. I got this idea into my head that I wanted to be like him when I grew up. Not that I think it’s such a good idea to want to be like other people. It never works out.

Once, he wrote on a paper I turned in:
Zach, this is really fine work. You blow me away, sometimes. I’d like to talk to you after school. If you get a chance, do you think you can come
by? So I made my feet wander over to his classroom after school. When I walked in, he was pacing around the room with a book in his hand. I could tell he was memorizing a poem. He smiled. It was like the guy was glad to see me. Wow, he was really wigging me out. He pointed to his desk. “Sit here,” he said.

I pointed to the chair behind his desk. “There?”

He nodded. “Yeah. That’s a good place, don’t you think so, Zach?”

So I sat there like I was the teacher or something.

“How does that feel?”

“Okay,” I said. “It feels okay. Weird.”

“Maybe you’d like to sit there someday. You know, teach kids about poetry and literature. Memorize poems, read books, teach them. How would that feel?” He smiled. You know, the thing about Mr. Garcia was that he smiled a lot and sometimes it would wig me out because I just wasn’t used to people who smiled a lot. Especially adults. And even though Mr. Garcia hadn’t been an adult for a long time, he was still an adult.

It was just strange to see someone like him. The world sucked. Didn’t he know that? Maybe he was a freak of nature. Look, the guy had no right to be that naïve. And then out of nowhere he looked at me and said, “Zach, did anyone ever tell you that you’re a brilliant kid?” Brilliant? The dude was absolutely stunning me out. What exactly did he expect me to say in response to that?

“You don’t like compliments, do you?”

“They’re okay,” I said.

He looked at me and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He sort of grinned. And then he said. “The papers you write, they’re amazing.”

“They’re okay.”

“They’re better than okay. I think I used the word amazing.” He walked up to the board and spelled it out. Always the teacher, that dude.

I stared at the word. I knew that word did not apply to me. But I just wasn’t going to get into an argument with him so I just said, “Okay.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” And then he sort of shook his head and smiled. “You know something? I like you, Zach. Is that okay, too, if I like you?”

Well, big deal, the guy liked everyone. How could you go through life liking so many people? There just weren’t that many people in the world worth liking. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s okay.”

“Good,” he said. “You like music?”

“Yeah, music is good. It’s okay.”

“You want to hear something?”

“Sure,” I said.

He walked to his closet and pulled a trumpet out of its case. He blew
into it, you know, like he was clearing it all out. He ran his fingers along the valves and played a scale. And then he said, “Okay, Zach, ready?” And then he started playing. I mean the guy could play. He played this really soft and beautiful song. I never knew a trumpet could whisper. I kept looking at his fingers. I wanted him to keep playing forever. It was better than any of the poems he’d read to us in class. It was like the whole loud world had gone really, really quiet, and there was nothing but this one song, this one sweet and gentle and brilliant song that was as soft as a breeze blowing through the leaves of a tree. The world just disappeared. I wanted to live in that stillness forever. I wanted to clap. And then, I just didn’t know what to do or what to say. I was high. I mean it. High and torn up to shreds.

“How was that?” He was smiling again.

He looked like an angel. He did. And thinking that really wigged me out. I didn’t know what to think about myself with that thought in my head. “Well,” I said, “it was better than okay.”

“Better than okay? Wow,” he said. “That’s the best thing anybody’s said to me all day.”

I mean, the guy was trying to connect with me. Only it was freaking me out. And then I just knew I had to get out of there. The guy was normal and I wasn’t, I don’t know, I was just, well, I was feeling these things that I just didn’t like. And then for a moment I just froze. I watched him put his trumpet away. “Anytime you want to listen to a song—”

“Okay,” I said.
But I had to get the hell out of there. I had to.
We sort of shook hands, you know, like we were friends. We nodded at each other.

As I was walking out the door, I heard his voice. “Zach, I know you’re sad sometimes. And if you ever want to talk, well, you know where to find me.”

My heart was beating and my palms were all sweaty and I felt like there was a hummingbird inside my heart and a pump inside my stomach. I found the nearest bathroom and threw up. I was completely torn up. I kept seeing Mr. Garcia’s black eyes, his hands, his face, his eyes, his hair. What was he doing in my head?

I cried all the way home. I just, hell, I don’t know, I just cried.

When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad’s bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.

I took a pint of bourbon, put it in my coat pocket and left the house. I walked around drinking and smoking and I kept crying and crying. I was, I don’t know
I don’t know I don’t know
wigged out, sad, drunk, torn to shreds, shit. I hated Mr. Garcia. Why did he tell me things like
you’re a brilliant kid?
Why did he write
amazing
on the board? That word was not a true word. It was not a word that lived inside me. And if he thought my papers were
amazing,
why didn’t he keep that thought to himself? And why did he say,
“Is it okay if I like you?”
Who the fuck wanted to like a kid like me? I hated that he noticed that I was sad. And I hated that he played that beautiful song. Why would I want to hear a trumpet whispering beautiful lies into my ears? And why the fuck was the guy wasting his time on a kid like me?

So I walked around and drank and smoked. And cried and yelled at Mr. Garcia.
I hate you. I hate you.
I thought the liquor was supposed to help. And it sort of
did
help. It made everything feel farther away. The farther away things felt, the better.

Mr. Garcia—he’s one of the pieces of paper on my floor. So was the bourbon I liked to drink.

Pieces of paper.

Yeah, see, maybe this place that’s supposed to heal me will just hand me a good broom. So I can sweep up the floor that’s in my brain. Maybe I’ll tell Adam that I don’t need to remember. I just need a really good broom.

Somebody put a calendar on the bulletin board in my room. I guess they wanted to make sure I knew what day it was. I think I heard a voice say, “You can mark the days.” That’s a funny thing to do with days. Mark them. Put an X on them. Cross them out.

I arrived here on New Year’s Day, 2008. There was a big storm on the night of January 2
^nd
. All that noise woke me up. I lay there and listened to the wind and I swear it was trying to tear down the cabin.

The wind was like the world. It was this thief that came along and tried to take whatever I had that was left.

I have this storm inside me. It’s trying to kill me. I wonder sometimes if that’s such a bad thing.

I know about storms.

I’m tired.

I just want to sleep forever.

Maybe I should tell the storm to go ahead and kill me.

I always felt guilty about my plan. The plan about getting perfect grades and going to college. I can be seriously mean and selfish. My mom and dad, they loved me. It’s not like they would hug me or touch me or things like that. Not that I like to be touched. This family thing, it’s complicated. Everyone’s got stuff. My mom and dad were trying to deal. My brother was trying to deal. I was trying to deal. Running out on them—maybe that’s not dealing. Maybe that’s just running.

My mom and dad were doing the best they could. I could see that. Things were not easy for them. I knew my mom was seriously depressed and my dad’s only hobby was drinking. And the thing of it was that I had school and they didn’t. What did they have?

High school was like going to work. I got paid with A’s. I was really into the studying and the A thing. This one time I thought I was going to explode over a B- I got on a pop quiz in history class. I mean there were firecrackers going off in my stomach and in my head. I was wigging. I went home and started swigging down bourbon. It always felt good, to take a drink, the way that the liquor burned in my throat and sort of exploded in my stomach. Liquor really tore me up. In a good way.

I went a little mental that night. Well, maybe I went a lot mental. Seriously. I took my baseball bat and went walking around and broke a few windshields. Okay, that doesn’t sound cool, but that’s what I did. I went totally mental. I admit it.

I ran into some problems and had to run a lot because lots of those
cars had alarms. But I really got off on beating the shit out of some of those fancy BMWs. Maybe I was just pissed off because I didn’t have a car. My brother, Santiago, he dropped out of high school and he didn’t have a job but he got a car. I never understood whatever passed between my parents and my brother. Just never got it. Families don’t make sense. You can’t explain them because families, well, they aren’t intellectual. And they aren’t emotional either—at least not mine. We didn’t do the emotion thing very well in my family.

See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads—just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there.

So yeah, my brother—the raging ingrate—he gets the car. I make straight A’s and do all kinds of stuff around the house and I
don’t
get squat.

Sometimes, I get these ideas in my head and I just can’t stop them from entering and it’s like the ideas tell me what to do. When I did stuff like break windshields and crap like that, it wasn’t even as if there were any thoughts in my head. There were just these feelings running through me, bad feelings. Really, really bad feelings. I just wanted to get rid of the feelings. I’m not sure God knew what he was doing when he put feelings inside of us. What is the purpose for human emotions? Will somebody please tell me?

So there were two things I really worked hard at: not feeling and getting good grades. The getting good grades was easy. The not-feeling part was hard. But I’m working on that. The way I see it is that if I didn’t feel anything, then I wouldn’t wig out anymore. No feelings = no wigging out. The solution was simple. So why is everything so hard?

My friends were really into drugs and booze. But it’s not as if I wasn’t into the mood-altering substance thing. I tried to be careful. I didn’t want to screw up my plan. And the drinking was cool. It helped, you know? And the other thing was that I was really into cigarettes. Love to smoke. And I’m good at it too.