Two Medicine (3 page)

I could hear her crying,
sniffling, wiping tears away for a moment, a sleeve ruffling over
the phone’s mouthpiece, then returning to the phone, “I don’t know,
I’m losing my mind, Will. I just know it’s not right, us being
together. It’s not meant to be… I… Let’s just talk tonight, I’m
sorry….” Then she hung up.

She had faltered in her
explanation, but I could feel what she meant. I knew her hanging up
like that was out of embarrassment and panic, not just the tears.
She was young like I said and still sometimes showed a bit of the
tentative, awkward youth in her mannerisms from time to time, in
her way of speaking. But that had charmed me all the more early
on.

I set the phone down on the
deli table and stared at the blank screen. Thoughts raced through
my mind:
Jonathan
,
him over at her apartment, that
smile, Holly crying on the other end, my ring I bought, the cabin,
my friends who would be meeting us, all the history with Holly, my
love for her, marriage, a new life together, her face... her sweet
voice. Is it over?

I looked at
my watch and saw that I was already late back at
the office. It was greatly frowned upon not to be at your desk at
all expected times at the magazine, especially by Linda, who was a
natural-born clock-watcher. I looked grimly down at my unfinished
salad; just thinking about walking back into that office made me
want to turn the table over and throw my beloved pasta salad
against the wall.

I just sat
dumbfounded.
How could she just end it
like that? Where the hell was the discussion, the debate, the
talking about it?
We typically told each
other ‘I love you’ about three times a day; and we go from that to…
me sitting alone at a deli looking at my phone.

Damn that South American,
and damn Holly and her youthfully awkward, bad, abortive breakup
attempt. We didn’t even discuss it. I wanted to drive up to see her
and tell her how I felt, and then bust that guy’s teeth out. That
big, tan, toothy smile of his...

I looked up in
bewilderment at the other patrons at the deli milled around or sat
eating like it was any other day, like nothing unusual or different
had just happened.

Can I call her back and
fix this? Should I call her back, try to reason with her – should I
do it now, or tonight?
I picked up the
phone and called her number again, but no answer. I then decided to
wait to call her again that evening. I slowly backed my chair from
the table, stood up, threw away the half-eaten food, and made my
way out the door of the deli and down the street.
I need to
convince
her to slow down, to go on the trip with me, and
we can work it out.
I thought about what I
would say that night as I walked out.
I was
jerked between sudden anger and sudden sadness, loss and rage.
Definitely the worst lunch I’ve had ever had.

When I was almost to the
office building I looked up at the grey steel pillars and glass
towering above me, and suddenly turned and walked quickly across
the street and into the parking deck where my car was. I was barely
thinking about what I was doing, moving more by instinct and desire
than thought, but I just had to not be in that office.

I got in the car, without
thinking of any destination, and I started it up and drove out of
the parking lot, not glancing at my building again. I pictured my
fabric and plastic chair conspicuously empty, Linda walking by and
sticking her head in my office in curiosity and suspicion. The
image left me with an unsettled feeling, but I drove faster down
avenue.

Three

I figured after a few
minutes that I could just go home and call Holly back again, from a
place with privacy, on my own turf, really talk this out. I’d also
have to call in sick, blaming the Greek pasta salad or something...
But as I drove, my friend Scott Dreymond called out of the blue,
calling from a tiki bar down the street from where I lived called
Coco Joe’s.

I decided without any
hesitation to go immediately there and meet him, even though it was
at a bar, at noon, on a Monday. Maybe he could advise me on what to
do about Holly. He was calling to talk about the cabin trip, I
expected – he and his girlfriend were the other couple.

My friend Scott was a very
old friend of mine, and was a drug addict and a drunk, but he was a
good friend, loyal and trustworthy to me and to hardly anyone else…
maybe just his girlfriend and me, if not to anyone else in the
entire world. His family didn’t trust him, his coworkers didn’t
trust him, but I did 100% and had always stuck by him through the
good times and bad – and there were some very bad times with
him.

He was perpetually
unemployed, lurching from one drunken episode to the next,
sometimes with lots of money and sometimes without, and only
surviving by the inexhaustible patience and mercy of his
grandmother who lived someplace in Florida at a rich retirement
community, and who supported him by depositing money in his account
on a semi-regular basis. He was her only grandchild and she poured
all her hopes and adoration on him, like a lonely dog-lover
pampering a vicious, dirty mongrel.

Scott, when he did work,
was actually a fantastic salesman, and he was currently, at least
for that week, an advertising salesman, selling yellow page book
ads to local companies. When he worked for more than a few months
he made a lot of money, but he was perpetually in between
jobs.

He had always been
unsteady since I had met him in high school, and then roomed with
him at college, but lately his life had been spiraling out of
control. Only in his late 20s, he had already had a home foreclosed
upon, and had already filed a personal bankruptcy, losing two
Porches and a ski boat in the process. He had also already been
married and divorced, and the divorce had been publicly vicious and
ugly, and massively expensive, which had started his latest spiral.
In the past he focused on pills, weed and booze, but Scott was
mainly only drinking very heavily these days, and he had gotten
into some legal trouble few months ago with a felony
DUI.

He and I had been best
friends for years, but life was drifting us apart, slowly,
inexorably, which saddened me. The drift was more to do with his
having gotten married, bought a large house, making lots of money
for a time, rather than because of his drugs or boozing. All of
those adult milestones were all things that I did not have or had
not obtained, and all things that tended to settle a person down
and change a person permanently. He had always partied too hard, of
course, but it was his success and large moves that actually
changed him.

I, in the alternative,
remained unsettled, unanchored by possessions and family; and he
was going the other way, albeit drunkenly. Thus, it was his periods
of financial success and excess more than the boozing, whoring and
drugs that had started to separate us. Strange but true.

But now, now that he was
in one of his downward spirals, now we were bonding together again,
re-welding the parts of our deep friendship together anew, perhaps
in mutual despair and drifting unstableness – but welding
nonetheless. I have found that the best, truest, and strongest
friendships are built from the ashes of common disasters, shared
sins and mutual flaws, rather than simple interests.

Brooke, the girl he was
going to bring on the camping trip, was a recent acquisition from a
yoga class he sometimes went to. She was 20 – a really hot, little,
dark-haired thing. Despite his extremes, his excess and
instability, his irrational decisions, people really liked him,
usually, and he had a talent for making people feel very
comfortable around him. It was a gift, which some people have, and
which a lot of good salesmen naturally have, and he had it. And
when you saw him it was almost always with a little sense of joyful
expectancy, even if in your last conversation nothing particularly
joyful had occurred. He just had… energy, and he and I had always
understood each other’s personalities and sense of humor. That’s
what we had.

Lately I had grown more
worried about him; I worried that he wouldn’t be able to pull
himself back out of this spiral this time. He seemed worse than
usual. And I worried, as I drove up to Coco Joe’s that soon it may
finally be the end for him, that he’d finally end up in a psych
ward or killing himself or something, and I didn’t know what to do
about it.

I walked into
the dimly lit wooden-walled tavern still shaken
from my call with Holly, still enormously worried, but now also
searching for Scott with a familiar apprehension. The bar was
decorated kind of half-heartedly like a tropical beach hut, but
failing to fully remove the Irish-pub feel of the last bar that was
there. Faint markings of the Irish flag above the dart boards could
be seen in the right light, a ghostly shadow of a crucifix faded on
the wall was visible, a certain Guinness-stained look to the wooden
bar surface all created a contradictory, schizophrenic mixture to
the feel of the place.

I walked in and passed the
live parrot that the owner always kept by the bar, apparently in
one last desperate and questionable attempt to sway the atmosphere
towards the cheerful and tropic. Down at the end of the bar I could
see Scott, slumping forward on a stool and talking with the
bartender. The bartender was Steve, an older, moody guy who kept to
himself mostly. Scott kept pointing purposefully to his watch as he
talked to Steve, I noticed, and I overheard as I walked over
something about “decency” and “society.” I already knew what he was
talking about.

“… So that’s why it
shouldn’t be strange to see someone drinking at noon, Steve…” Scott
nodded quickly at me and looked back to the bartender. “It’s
actually the more
appropriate
time to be drinking…”

Scott was wearing a blue
blazer sport coat and khaki pants, with leather loafers. This was
then a business day for him. He was a good looking guy overall, on
the short side but with a firm build and sandy-blonde hair. We
contrasted, with my tall and lean frame.

“
Uh huh.” Steve grunted as
he carved up limes, only half listening.

“Will,” Scott addressed me
like I had already been in on the conversation for a while, “don’t
you
agree
that
people can handle alcohol better during daytime hours? I was just
explaining to our buddy Steve here that people can’t handle our
booze at night, none of us can, not when our bodies are tired and
starting to shut down – it’s the worst time to drink
actually.”

I had heard him make this
point at least a dozen times before: bucking the taboos of society,
particularly in respect to booze. Partly it was a joke to him, but
he meant it also to a troubling degree.

He picked up his glass of
wine and turned it this way and that in the dim light, something he
always did with wine, as if casually inspecting its ambient
quality, even though he didn’t really know anything about fine
wines; it was just something he liked to do for the look of
it.

“
But
have a little snort in the morning…” He shot a gulp of wine and
then set the glass down. “Or at lunch, and you have the whole day
to burn it off. At night you come down and sleep like a baby
–
better
than a baby.”

He had set the glass down
a little too hard and Steve glared at him for a moment, then
glanced over at me with a warning look.

“
And no hangover,” Scott
murmured to the wine glass.

“Yea, well it’s 12:30 and
you’re already drunk,” I said, “so I don’t think your theory has
any hope. Let’s chat a minute.” I pulled him over to a nearby
table. I ordered myself a beer, despite what I preached; but I felt
kind of justified in drinking a little from what I had been through
already that morning.

“
Holly broke up with me,”
I said as we sat down. “I think…”

Scott’s sluggish expression
was first of surprise and then doubt. “What do you mean,
‘
you think
’?” he
said grumpily.

I told him about the
conversation with Holly, how it hit me as soon as I heard her
voice, that something was vastly different. I told him about
Jonathan.

His face slowly changed.
He always grew worried when he saw me depressed. I think it was
because I was supposed to be a kind of life raft for him, someone
to hold onto to stay afloat; someone who he knew he could count on
when worse came to worse. He had his grandmother in Florida, but
she wouldn’t be around forever. Scott knew about my plans to
propose, but he also knew Holly had been worrying me
lately.

“
Don’t overreact,” Scott
said, taking a sip of the last of his wine.

He motioned to Steve for
more by pointing at my glass and then his. “She’s just got cold
feet – probably has picked up on the fact that you’re proposing or
something – she’s young and she really acts like it
sometimes.”

“No she’s ending it. You
didn’t hear her voice.” I shook my head slowly, looking around the
empty bar. I was trying to think of a way to convey to him this new
rising feeling of loss and anger and loneliness I was experiencing
right there in front of him, but what could I say?