On a Friday night in the dead of winter I was preparing to do what, at that point in my life, I had been doing every Friday night. Preparation was stupidly uncomplicated. All I had to do was combine several relatively pleasant and inexpensive commodities to produce a sort of momentary bliss or euphoria. It wasn’t a creative thing to do. All over the country, millions of people were doing the very same thing. In fact, in my own neighborhood I could hear the roars and murmurs and squeaks of other fine human beings concocting artificial Friday-night happiness for themselves, just as I was.
It involved the following: a consumable psychoactive depressant produced through fermentation that creates, in the best of circumstances, pleasing neurological effects; a series of deliberate mathematical sounds and silences absorbed through the human ear and felt in the brain or heart or groin; and a comfortable chair with which to rest one’s body in a sitting position.
The fermented beverage was to be consumed slowly and with great care, so as to avoid slobbering or crying or death.
The pleasing noise was to be heard loudly, so as to drown out the mind’s voice and listen to someone else for a little while.
The chair was to be easy enough to get away from, so as to allow its occupant to move to a bed when the supine position became necessary, which is typically sometime after having drunk three to five bottles of a fermented beverage.
Combined, these things could make unhappy men and women into happy ones. It could make nightmares evaporate, and make arbitrary lives seem beautiful and wonderful and necessary. It could make one appreciate their own pitiful existence, and thankful and indebted to the two lustful individuals who had made that possible. Above all, it could, and often does, possess a human being to call another human being on the telephone to say that which they could never say otherwise, which is this: “I love you.”
Yes, and I was busily putting all this together when the phone rang. It was Leila. I had a carrot in my mouth. It was hard to talk on account of the fat vegetable that lay in my mouth like a cigar. But I did anyway. I said, “Hullo.” I did my best to tell her I was preparing to sit in a chair and listen to music while syrupy ethanol raced like hell through my veins. I told her I was fully prepared to do all of this alone. “Come get me,” she said. “I want to do that, too.”
• • •
I sat down in my car. I fiddled with my keys until I found the correct one, which was larger than the rest and partially coated in plastic. I put it in the ignition and turned it a little ways clockwise. The engine boomed and roared. The headlights flickered to life with a fizzle and a pop.
My bloodstream was as clean as it had ever been. That meant I would be able to drive civilly and politely, and that I would be less likely to kill someone. In less than an hour that wouldn’t be true anymore. Leila had called me at the absolute last possible moment to still be included in my Friday night ritual. She’d called me just before I was to put playful magic into my veins. Good for her.
I zipped down the expressway with the heat on. The windows of my car were outlined in frost. A full moon hung in the sky like a ball of yarn.
I parked at The Wine Source, which was right next door to Leila’s house. The store was aglow with cheery lights, and was filled to the brim with perfectly normal-looking people. I adored The Wine Source, because for several months it had provided me with a respectable and dignified way to purchase alcohol. It had a fantastic way of not making me feel like a creep or a deadbeat. I wagered that much of the guilt was diminished by the simple fact that they were famous in the neighborhood for selling artisanal cheese. “Artisanal,” of course, was an adjective that, when applied to an edible noun, made white people feel better about themselves.
I called Leila and told her I’d be inside picking out which flavor of sin suited me the best. That was just fine with her. She said she’d join me in a few moments.
I walked through the automatic doors and stood in the entryway with my hands on my hips. I had come to purchase something cheap and delicious and effective. I was wearing a royal-purple t-shirt under an unbuttoned smoke-gray pea coat. Everything below the belt was wrapped in brown corduroy and held together by a black leather belt punctuated with silver rivet holes. My hair was in a fabulous mood, and so decided to communicate this to the world. It was light and airy. Everything was great. I felt wonderful—felt life could be wonderful every now and then.
And then something slightly embarrassing happened, which was that an employee greeted me by my first name. Hearing the name my mother and father had given me inside of a liquor store made me feel like an insect had just crawled into my ear. It made me feel self-conscious and spooky. I said, “Hello.”
I walked gingerly over to a wall of transparent refrigerators and chose to stand in front of the one that had inside the most plentiful selection of colorful boxes. Those were the drinks for people who didn’t much care for the taste of fermented-anything. I opened the door. Cold air came pouring out—and with it music, too. Whoever was stocking the drinks was listening to “Don’t You Forget About Me,” a song I was familiar with only because it preceded the end credits of The Breakfast Club. I had to laugh. Life could be wonderfully weird like that sometimes.
A face appeared from behind the rows and rows of bitter lemonade and fuzzy navels. Someone was inside the refrigerator. It was a squat bearded man who had the face of a hog. “Hello,” I said. He snorted and managed to look bored and angry at the same time. Maybe it was the music that made him feel that way. Maybe it was the cold.
I grabbed a box that contained my favorite way to feel lovely. Inside were six bottles filled with a special variety of apple juice.
As I went to close the glass door, I saw in my peripheral vision the ghoulish outline of a colossal being standing directly to my left. I fell backwards and landed on my hands. I looked up. I stared at my tormentor directly in the eyes.
Impossibly tall, broad-shouldered, arms akimbo—there stood Leila Wylie. Her hair was straight and long and the color of coal. It was chopped in an even line just above her eyebrows. There was a little red bow in there somewhere. She was wearing shoes that made her four inches taller; she towered over me like a redwood. She could have eaten me.
“Hey,” said Leila. “How are you?”
• • •
When we arrived at my home in Mt. Vernon, there were cars and people littered all over the place. My parking space had been taken. In fact there were no spaces to be found anywhere, including the street. We were confused and disappointed. All we wanted to do was get liquored up and laugh like hell—and couldn’t.
I ended up parking in a dusty brown tract of land behind a row of boarded up buildings. No one had lived there for decades, and probably wouldn’t again for the rest of time. Black birds gazed at us from dead telephone wires. Everything was practically post-apocalyptic.
Leila laughed. She told me a story about when she first came to Baltimore, and how she’d taken the wrong bus and ended up at a desolate wasteland at the edge of the world—at the far, far reaches of Baltimore. The bus driver, she said, was unsympathetic. He didn’t care that she might be mugged or raped or killed. He told her that if she wanted to get home, she’d have to ride on the back of his motorcycle. She declined. She embraced the wasteland.
At that moment we did the same. We buttoned and zipped up our coats and braved the black empty winter that existed outside of my car. We looked toward the brick monolith that stood menacingly over the empty lot we were in. I told Leila that was where I slept and kept my things and where my little cats lived. “Oh, okay,” she said, unimpressed. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t really care, either.”
As we got closer to the entrance, it became obvious that a fête of sorts was underway. All around us were large and stupid children dressed in evening gowns and two-piece suits. Everyone was eating cheese and sipping wine and moving their mouths but saying nothing. It was crowded and noisy. Leila and I made a beeline for the elevator. A friendly young woman grabbed my arm just as I summoned the elevator car to rescue us from the carnival atmosphere of the party. It was the activities coordinator who worked in the main office. I remembered that I liked her; she was always so sweet. She smiled and said something about an art show in the building’s gallery. “Ryan,” she said, “we never see you down here.”
“I’m not often here,” I said.
“Oh, yes, but you’re here now.”
“That’s true, yes.”
“Why don’t you come back in a few minutes and have some food? Maybe enjoy some art?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll be back down shortly.” I motioned to Leila. “We’ve got something we have to take care of right now.”
“Wonderful!” said the sweet and friendly activities coordinator.
The elevator screamed in the only language it knew, which was a deafening electronic chime. It shook my eardrum and made me feel nauseous. It was saying, “Hello, I’m here—let’s go!” We walked inside. I hit the button labeled “2”. I thought about the phrase “enjoy some art” and it made my head hurt. Leila looked bored. She didn’t act like she wanted to enjoy some art at all.
We weren’t three steps into my apartment before cans were cracked open and bottles were relieved of their little metal hats. We swilled down exciting and fruit-infused beverages quickly and numbly. Leila sat on a tall wooden chair leaned against my living room wall and told me about people she didn’t love anymore. I rolled around on my Persian rug, laughing stupidly, and told her about all the people I wished would love me.
When giggling became uncontrollable, and faces became dull and red with artificial warmth, we finally made our grand reappearance in the lobby. I was severely under-dressed. Leila was bubbly and hilarious. Both of us were outfitted with tall cans of pear cider which were sipped at regular intervals to ensure that jokes remained funnier than they actually were, and that life felt more tolerable than it actually was.
In the twenty minutes we’d been gone, the food table had been devastated by hungry gallery-goers. The hors d’oeuvres and little sandwiches and array of multicolored cheese cubes were gone, were in the fat bellies of people all around us. Even the vegetable tray was devoid of any life, save for scraps of cauliflower that lay unloved in sad little pools of ranch dressing.
We stepped inside the glass-enclosed gallery to see what all the fuss was about. Everywhere we went we were met with bland and unimaginative conversations that had no meaning or life behind them. Even those who were doing the talking looked unsettled by their own insufferable chatter. “The pizza there is phenomenal,” or “The bass player is really something,” or “I just wish I could make something like this, you know?” The subtext of every sentence was invariably this: “I am severely unhappy with my life, and I am afraid I will be like this forever.”
Sip, sip, sip!
The room gradually became stuffy and weird and loud. Gravity was heavy and then light and then heavy again. Reality wobbled and sank. A woman in a raven-black evening dress coughed. A bearded man adjusted his glasses and uttered something inconsequential to a woman who looked halfway there. Outside, there was laughter from a group of depressingly young nicotine junkies . . . and little smoke clouds could be seen rising into a cold and unloving nighttime sky. Everyone was doing everything they could to avoid the ostensible reason they’d gathered in the first place, which was to enjoy some art.
Leila and I turned to face what it is no one else seemed to want to. There, center stage, in the stark middle of people clothed in thousands of dollars worth of fancy clothing, who were bulging with cheese and wine and fake laughter, was an inflatable children’s pool filled with chemically-colored blue water. Outlining it like a pie crust were shards of gray chalky drywall, which had been broken into bits and sprinkled haphazardly without any obvious restraint or discretion. From the ceiling hung multicolored bird feathers held in place with clear fishing line. It was phenomenally stupid. I looked at it and felt nothing other than a sort of vague indignation toward an enemy I had never known.
Leila took a sip from the tall can in her right hand. Her eyes were hollow and dark and dead as she stared at the dumb arrangement of toys before us. She lowered herself to my height and attempted to whisper in my ear, but failed to control the volume of her voice, probably because of all the lovely chemical reactions going on inside her body, and practically screamed the following: “I fucking hate artists.”
• • •
Hours later we found ourselves eating homemade pizza and watching a Greek movie about a father and mother who live in a fenced-in compound with their three adult-aged children, who consisted of a young man and two young women. The children have never left the compound, and are kept inside through fear—fear of the lies their father perpetuates in order to gain their obedience. Once a month a woman who works with the father is brought in to have empty, loveless sex with the son. The woman exposes the two daughters to outside influences—giving them movies to watch, or whatever, thereby threatening to unravel the sick theater orchestrated by the father. She is beaten with a VCR player and banned from ever returning. So the oldest daughter is made to wear heavy make-up and have sex with her own brother. And so on.
It was Leila’s idea. I love her for that. She has a brilliant sense of humor.
She told me, afterwards, that she planned to move to New Orleans, and didn’t know why exactly other than she’d visited there for work and fell in love with it. I told her that was just as good as any reason to live somewhere. “Plus,” I said, “it’s sure as shit not Baltimore.”
“Will you come with me when I go to move? And help drive the moving truck? I’m terrified of driving that moving truck.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll go with you.” It was a verbal contract. It meant I would have to drive a sixteen-foot truck through seven states and unload furniture when we arrived wherever it was we were going. That was all right with me.
“Great,” said Leila. “Now drive me home.”
I drove her home—drove her to Hampden. She hugged me and and said she would be going out of town and wouldn’t see me for a while. I said, “Okay.” I told her I loved her, too. She walked away and was swallowed in the shadows of the canopy covering her front porch. I suddenly felt weary and alone. I left.