Tim Murphy - Christodora

It was a very gritty meeting. It wasn’t the posh, arty, sober people of Silver Lake, the mostly yuppie former alcoholics and potheads with a sprinkling of fairly successful gay guys with meth problems and a couple long-ago glamour cokeheads like Drew. It was the derelicts and the quasi-homeless dirty, crusty kids of downtown, mostly junkies who’d either fallen from creative grace or, like Carrie, who said she was a singer, only ever fumbled on the fringes of L.A. creative life before sliding totally off the radar. Mateo felt at home there, relieved, with nothing to prove; there were even some blacks and Mexicans there. He sat there with his black knit cap pulled down low and his black shades pushed back up on it, his arms crossed over the threadbare green-striped T-shirt he found in the royal-blue duffel bag of clothes Millimom had thrown together for him when she came to see him at the airport before he schlepped out to rehab in L.A. and then, after leaving rehab, to Drew and Christian’s. His life had more or less been reduced to this bag, even if Drew and Christian had given him his own room to set it down in for a while.

So he sat there in the downtown meeting with his legs spread in the black skinny jeans he’d bought somewhere back in 2010, 2011—that whole foggy period when he was still managing to show up at Pratt but his life was becoming more and more of a nodding dream. That was when needles — spikes, with their horror and then their vise-grip allure, their absolute necessity — floated into the picture. That first time he’d let someone shoot him up, his gut told him there’d be no going back, and his gut had been right.

And in this meeting, he was horrified to learn it was one of those round-robin formats where everyone who has under a year’s sobriety has to speak when it comes to them. And he’d been exchanging glances, and then even a half-smile and a shrug, with Carrie, when the round-robin came to him.

“I’m Mateo and I’m a addick,” he said. Every time he said it like this, he thought of the Parentals and how horrified they’d be to hear him talking this put-upon slang— I’m a addick —but he loved it, because he felt it put him squarely with the subterraneans in the whole class structure of Twelve-Step World. At Silver Lake, once, he’d allowed himself to say it like that.

Drew, sitting beside him, smiled at him sidelong, amused, and asked, sotto voce, “You a addick ?” Minutely, he nodded and smiled, and she scratched his knee for a quick second.

That was back when he had about seventy-two days. He liked Drew, he had to admit. She’d been a flickering presence in his life growing up, her trips to New York where she would down endless cups of tea in their kitchen with Millimom, and one vacation he and los Parentales had taken to the West Coast the summer he was thirteen. Drew was more or less Millimom’s best friend, and he’d always kind of liked her because she had a saucy, direct pushiness and deadpan bite that Millimom, with her perpetual air of just-barely-contained mourning for the planet lacked.

“You a gangsta,” Drew would say drily upon first spotting him on her New York visits, as he stood in front of her, just home from school, in jeans falling off his butt, his high-tops splayed out in every direction around the scrunched bottoms of his pants legs, his hair pulled back in a rubber band popping out the slot of his flat-brimmed Yankees cap, his backpack hanging precariously off his shoulders.

“He talks like a gangsta now,” Millimom would observe drolly, falling into her slow, signature nod.

He would tip his chin toward Drew, sitting there sipping her tea with her big, expensive leather bag at her feet, and pop back, trying not to smile. “Maybe I am a gangsta.”

“So come here, gangsta,” she would say, laughing, and he’d slouch toward her. Then she’d stand and give him a big hug and kiss while he stood there and maybe just barely put one arm up loosely around her back. “Your art is amazing,” she would say. “I am blown away.”

“How do you know about my art?”

Drew tipped her chin toward Millimom. “Who do you think e-mails me pictures of your art all the time with every tiny update about your awards?”

Millimom was staring down into her mug of tea, trying to look neutral, inscrutable, but with that bleeding-heart, just-about-to-cry look around the eyes that both touched him and drove him fucking crazy.

“You didn’t tell me you were doing that,” he finally said to Millimom.

Milly looked up at him, gestured innocently. “I thought your new work from school was good and I wanted to show it to her,” she said. “Are you mad at me about that, too?” She turned to Drew. “He’s always mad at me these days.”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I just — I just didn’t know that.”

“And I send her my chapters,” Drew added. Drew wrote some kind of weird books, like she was a journalist who traveled around interviewing people and then wrote books instead of articles, he was fairly certain. He didn’t know what to say. He was sensing some peek into their back-world, which he didn’t really understand; he could just sense that it had been weird and maybe slightly lesbionic in that sensitive, touchy-feely white-girl way, and he didn’t want to really know more than that. So instead he just looked at Drew and shrugged and said, “Well, thanks. Welcome to New York.” He headed toward his room.

“Thanks for having me,” Drew called back drily.

“Mateo,” Millimom said to him.

He stopped short. “Yeah?”

“I just wanted to know if you remembered about six o’clock tonight.”

Inwardly, he crumpled in humiliation. She meant the shrink. There’d been some incidents — okay, there’d been a lashing-out incident with Jared-dad that had involved a halfhearted fist to his face, and a verbal lashing-out incident involving her and the word bitch —and, after a few horrible, frozen days when he considered just running away in the night, they’d come into his bedroom very gently and asked if he’d be open to seeing a man in the neighborhood they’d found, a guy a few blocks away named Richard Gallegos, MSW. He wanted to say no but he felt, after the fist and the curse word, maybe there was no way out of it. And this night, he wished he’d forgotten, but unfortunately he’d been thinking of it all day; it was supposed to be his first night seeing him.

“Yeah, I remembered,” he mumbled back, before going in his room and shutting the door and playing Young Jeezy off the speakers in his laptop and doing homework until five thirty, when Millimom knocked, stuck her head in the door, asked if he was readying himself to leave.

“It’s only five thirty,” he said, not looking away from the laptop.

“I just think you should be a little early for the first one,” she said.

He sat up, sighed deeply, saved what he was working on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get ready.”

“You want me to walk over with you?”

Finally, he looked at her. “It’s, like, eight blocks away, right? Why, are you afraid I’m not going to go?”

Now she sighed, ran a hand through her hair. “No, Mateo. I just thought—” She stopped. “Forget it, of course you can walk over yourself.”

“Okay,” he said rather pointlessly. He caught her eyes; she caught his. He could clearly read hers. They were saying, Why? Why? Why do you hate me? And he felt his were saying, Please, woman, leave me alone! And then he and she cut their eyes away from each other and she closed the door.

A few minutes later, he pulled his ponytail back through the gap in his cap, grabbed his keys and cell phone, and walked back out into the kitchen, which smelled like something Asian-y that Millmom was cooking — something ginger-y. Millimom and Jared-dad were at the kitchen table, Jared-dad drinking a glass of red wine, Millimom and Drew drinking Pellegrino. He barely nodded to them all as he stalked toward the door, hands shoved in his pockets.