T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Benny Chung was the first one to break. He was seventeen, a Merit Scholarship finalist, with narrow shoulders, wrists you could loop two fingers around and a head that seemed to float up like a balloon from the tether of his neck. His shoulders dipped forward as if he were trying to duck under a low-hanging limb, then his lips pulled back and he spewed all over the floor and his pant legs and his black high-top Converse sneakers. It was a heroic effort, so much of that umber chowder coming out of so frail a vessel, and Benny had to go down on one knee to get it all out. Nobody said anything, and nobody was laughing now. Up on the screen, Keanu Reeves said the magic word, and all the pledges, including Benny, hammered another shot. Benny couldn’t hold it, though, and neither could Chris. Chris saw the look on Benny’s face — the outrage of an entire organism and all its constituent cells — and he remembered his own legs buckling and the release the first wave of nausea gave him, and then he felt nothing more.

All the Delts were swarming the room now, expostulating over this disgusting display, this pathetic showing on the part of a pledge class that wasn’t worthy of the name, and hands took hold of Benny and Chris, people shouting and jostling, the whinny of laughter, cries of “Gross!” and “Don’t get any of that shit on me, man,” the hands finding purchase at armpit and knee. They laid Benny and Chris side by side on Chris’ bed, then thundered back down the three flights of stairs to the game room. Half an hour went by and both bottles of Don José were drained by the time anyone thought to look in on them, and another ten minutes elapsed before Dagan Drava, a premed student, realized that Chris wasn’t breathing.

“So he was drunk,” Jimmy told me, the band into their opening number now — blues, they were doing a blues tune that seemed vaguely familiar—“and who hasn’t been drunk? I’ve been drunk a thousand times in my life, you know what I mean? So I figure, all the way up there with Caroline hyperventilating and what-if-ing and driving me half crazy, that we’re going to walk into the hospital and he’ll be sitting up in bed with a sheepish grin on his face, one hell of a headache, maybe, and a lesson learned, but no harm done.”

Jimmy was wrong. His son had choked on his own vomit, inhaled it, compromising his lungs. No one knew how long he’d been lying there in the bed next to Benny Chung without drawing a breath before the E.R. team restarted his heart, and no one was sure of how much damage had been done to his brain functions. A CT scan showed edema of the brain tissue. He was in a coma. A machine was breathing for him. Caroline went after the doctors like an inquisitor, relentless, terrifying in her grief. She stalked the halls, chased them to their cars, harangued them on the phone, demanded — and got — the top neurologist in New England. Chris’ eyes never opened. Beneath the lids, like a dirty secret, his pupils dilated to full and fixed there, focused on nothing. Two days later he was dead.

I bought Jimmy a drink, watched myself in the mirror behind the bar. I didn’t look like anybody I knew, but there I was, slouched over my elbows and a fresh drink, taking in air and letting it seep back out again. The woman with the deep-dredged laugh was gone. A couple in their twenties had settled into the vacant spot on the other side of Jimmy, oblivious to the drama that had just played out here, the woman perched on the barstool while the man stood in place, rocking in her arms to the beat of the music. The band featured a harp player, and he moved round the confines of the stage like a caged animal, riffling the notes till he went all the way from despair to disbelief and back again, the bass player leaning in as if to brace himself, the guitar rising up slow and mournful out of the stew of the backbeat.

“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Jimmy said. “I’m out here in California having the time of my life.” He pointed a finger at the rain-streaked window. “All this sun really cheers me up.”

I don’t know why I asked — I was drunk, I guess, feeling maudlin, who knows? — but I said, “You got a place to stay tonight?”

He looked into the shot glass as if he might discover a motel key at the bottom of it. “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “Or on leave, actually. I was staying with my brother — up on Olive Mill? — but he got to be a pain in the ass. Caroline couldn’t take it. She’s back in New York. At least, I think she is.”

“Hard luck,” I said, just to say something.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “sure, and that’s the long and the short of it. But I tell you, I clean up real nice, and what I plan to do is pick up one of these spare women here, like that one over there — the dye job looks like she just crawled out of a coffin? She’ll take me home with her, what you want to bet? And what you want to bet she’s got a shower, maybe even a Jacuzzi?”

I didn’t want to bet anything. I wanted another drink, that was all. And after that, I wanted to have maybe one more, at this place up the street I’d been to a couple of times, just to see what was happening, because it was Saturday night and you never knew.

—

A week later — it was the next Friday, actually — I went into a place down at the marina for cocktails with a woman I’d almost picked up after I left Jimmy at the steakhouse the previous Saturday. Her name was Steena, she was five-ten, blond, and just getting over a major breakup with a guy named Steve whose name dropped from her lips with the frequency of a speech impediment. She’d agreed to “have a drink” with me, and though I’d hoped for more, I had to assume, after we’d had two glasses each of Piper-Heidsieck at twelve and a half dollars per and a plate of oysters, that I wasn’t her type either. The whole time she kept glancing at her watch, and finally her cell phone rang and she got up from the table and went out into the anteroom to take the call. It was Steve. She was sorry, but he wanted to meet her later, for dinner, and he sounded so sad and heartbroken and shot through with misery and contrition she couldn’t refuse. I had nothing to say. I just stared at her, the plate of desecrated oysters between us. “So,” she said, hovering over the table as if she were afraid to sit back down, “I guess I’m going to have to say goodbye. It’s been nice, though. Really.”

I paid the waitress and moved up to the bar, idly watching the Lakers go through their paces with the sound muted and gazing out the window on the pale bleached forest of the ships’ masts gathered there against the night. I was drinking brandy and water, picking through a bowl of artificial snack food and waiting for something to happen, when I ran into the other man I wanted to tell you about. Shaq’s monumental head loomed up on the screen and then faded away again, and I turned around and there he was, just settling into the seat beside me. For a minute I thought he was Jimmy — he had the same hangdog look, the rangy height, the air of an athlete gone to seed — and it gave me a start, because the last thing I needed the way I was feeling was another bout of one-way commiseration. He nodded a greeting, then looked up at the screen. “What’s the score?”

“The Lakers are killing them,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure anyway.” But this was Jimmy, had to be, Jimmy all dressed up and with his hair combed and looking satisfied with himself. It was then that I remembered the brother. “You wouldn’t be Jimmy’s brother, would you?” I said. “By any chance?”

“ Whose brother?”

I felt foolish then. Obviously Jimmy hadn’t given me his real name, and why would he? The alcohol bloomed in my brain, petals unfolding like a rosebud in time-lapse photography. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just thought…” and let it die. I went back to watching the game. Helped myself to the artificial snacks. Had another brandy and water. After a while the man beside me ordered dinner at the bar, and I got into a conversation about recycling and the crime of waste with a startled-looking woman and her martini-fueled husband. Gradually, the bar filled up. The startled-looking woman and her husband went in to dinner and somebody else took their place. Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking I should move on, pick up a pizza, some takeout, make it an early night, and I could envision myself standing at the supercharged counter of Paniagua’s Pizza Palace, where you could get two slices with chorizo and jalapeños for three dollars and fifty cents, but instead I found myself turning to the man on my left. “You do have a brother, though, right?” I said.