Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Me too. But that’s what my parents named me: John Doe.” His two front teeth were so white they looked blue in dark of the evening. Even when we were sandwiched between his and Mo’s cars, the rest of his teeth receded into shadow, and it made him look like either a vampire or a child. “What did your parents name you?” he asked finally.

“Alivopro Doyle,” I said.

“You don’t look like a Doyle,” he said. Always by merely identifying myself I was a suspect. Other children came from bodies colliding whereas, according to my mother, I came from prayer. I wasn’t only the consequence of the birds and the bees. It was proof, she said, that if there was a will there was a way, but it always sounded like she was convincing herself.

“I’m adopted,” I said.

“Such great fortune you have.”

“Fortune how?”

“You’re beautiful and you’re interesting,” he said. “You could write a screenplay or a memoir about being adopted. It could be a quite lucrative endeavor. It could make the public heart pitter patter.” For some reason, he began tiptoeing, aping ballerina at the word “pitter,” and I felt myself step back.

“I’m not really interested in doing that.”

“Youth is wasted on the young, and stories are wasted on characters,” he said. “You know, you’re one of the younger ones I’ve seen here. That’s interesting too. I could offer my expertise to you with the writing if you wanted to go fifty-fifty on an advance.”

“I’m not an alcoholic, and that’s not denial,” I said. “I’m here with my cousin because my mother asked me.”

“Oh well a lot of people are just adopted. An adopted alcoholic teenager: that’s special.” He shook a cigarette from a dubiously intact cardboard pack.

“Well I guess I’m not very special. I guess I’m just another girl with a cousin.”

“I mean no offense. Hey, I’m not interesting either. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. A writer who drinks: there’s a novel one!”

“But that’s not why you started drinking is it? I don’t think the drink is what made them geniuses.”

“I started drinking because I’m not an animal,” he said, almost screaming. “I can’t eat and sleep and be pleased. I have needs beyond needs. Besides, print media is dead. It’s depressing, everything going the way of the ether.”

“Maybe you just need to write something more powerful than electronic devices,” I said, stretching my peripheral vision in search of Mo.

“You think that’s not what I’m trying? I’m putting it all on the line. And I don’t mean taking a goddamn class. I mean taking uppers for writer’s block — and for the money I’m not getting out of writer’s block.” He took an orange jar from his pocket and shook it in my face, the flamboyant rattle cracking the cool, quiet air.

“Wouldn’t that make you off the wagon?”

“You don’t even have a wagon to get off. What do you know? You know what we say? Once an addict always an addict. I’ve been dry eighty-two days, and I was stuck at page one-fifty of my manuscript for sixty of the eighty-two.”

“Until you gave up your sobriety for a few more pages.”

“I could barely get out of the fetal position. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve always been on the wagon, probably. What are you, fifteen? You don’t even have anything to lose.”

But I did have something to lose. Pounds. Fifteen or twenty — wasn’t that possible with amphetamines? Figure skating had become a math test, and this was a way to subtract. This was the solution. It was incredible to think that all along I’d known how to lose a load of myself fast— the quad-quad! — but just hadn’t remembered. Yes, I needed to up the ante.

“For chrissakes, I’ve just met you and already I’m alienating you. I’m sorry. I’m a little tense. I shouldn’t even be taking these. You’re right.”

The greatest hurdle would be the need to lose quite a bit of weight, puberty-proportioned weight no less. Breasts could be burned off though. Breasts were fat. No, puberty was not the irrevocable disaster as I’d thought it before. Only bones were, and my hips hadn’t grown. I just needed to know if my hips would grow any more. That would really be the end of it. I’d never be able to get rid of those without getting rid of all of myself. But I didn’t know this future. I hadn’t any knowledge of my birth mother. So, I had to believe in a second coming. Mark was right in a sense — I stood to gain everything and lose nothing if I believed. I had to believe I would skate again. What was it he’d said? If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager? I had to take these drugs before hips could happen to me.

I thought of the first day of school, when Mr. Winton the history teacher said of historical enquiry, “With hindsight, we have fifty-fifty vision.” I thought he’d made a mistake then, but the breach in cliché was intentional. “So why study history?” he asked. “Because cryptic as it is, the past is our only context for the future.” I’d wanted to disagree. I’d wanted to say you don’t have it until you do, but then he started talking legal precedents and the fate of Roe v. Wade. “Be afraid, young women,” he said. “Be very afraid.”

But now I decided not to be afraid. I could still skate if I could just lose enough body fat fast enough to beat my bone structure, whatever it was. I could be a girl again. A girl with a boyish figure. I would race back to myself faster this way. I would be back in Boston, the Olympic factory, unnaturally contorted, swindling physics with my swindled physique. My back was fine except for the pain, and skating was often painful anyway, so it was hardly a sacrifice. Nothing would ever be a sacrifice for that love.

“Why don’t you give them to me?” I said, adding, “I’ll give you sixty dollars.”

John Doe leaned his head to the left. “Excuse me?”

“I’ll give you sixty dollars, and you’ll give me those pills. You’ll be on the wagon and up sixty dollars. And I’ll have those pills.”

“But I want them.”

“You just said you shouldn’t be taking them.

“But I want them.” He bent down to pretend to retie his shoelace.

“You don’t have more?”

“No.”

A lie.

“Can’t you get more?” There had to be away. There was a way.

“Technically, yes. I have a prescription.”

“With refills?”

“With refills. This is America after all.”

God bless America! “So what’s the problem?”

“It’s one thing to take drugs. It’s another to sell them to a kid.” He fluttered the door of his car open and almost closed.

“Five minutes ago you were trying to take half the profits of my life when you thought I was an alcoholic. Look, I’m offering you sixty dollars.” From my pocket I pulled the money and waved it in his face the same way he’d shaken the pills at me.

“This bottle isn’t even half full.”

“Don’t be a pessimist. Be a capitalist. Is it a deal?” He looked uncertain. “Well come on, is it a deal?”

He turned the orange bottle over in his hands, maybe maybe, this gesture of weighing odds, costs, benefits, considering. “It’s a deal,” he said finally, snatching the money from my grip. “But I’d never play poker with you.”

It began to snow, and Mo turned up with diarrhea as the reason for his absence. “And I didn’t even eat Mexican food!” John Doe and I looked at Mo to not have to look at each other, faking interest with smiling nods. I pulled the hood of my coat up over my head.

“We should get going,” I said.

“Hasta la vista, brother,” Mo said, reaching his hand out to shake with John Doe. He didn’t even seem to notice the hesitancy with which his shake was returned.