Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

TROY POKES HIS HEAD out of the bedroom as soon as I come in from work. He’s got that look, like he’s been up all night and made an important decision. I’ve seen it before. When he was going to study hypnosis and open a clinic. When he was going to move to Berlin to marry some girl he met online. When he thought he had the lottery figured out.

“Want to go for a walk?” he says.

Troy weighs 450 pounds. He has no chin, no waist, hasn’t seen his dick in years except in a mirror. The only time he leaves the apartment is once a week to drive to the supermarket, and then it takes him fifteen minutes to haul himself back up the stairs from the carport to our place after paying a kid from the neighborhood to carry his bags.

And he wants to go for a walk?

“Around the block,” he says. “For exercise.”

I’m beat. Still can’t get used to working nights. It’s the kind of constant fatigue where you feel like you’re floating an inch off the ground, where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren’t really there. Right now all I want is to guzzle a few beers and hit the hay, but Troy is my only friend in the world, and that should mean something.

So: “Sure,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”

First come the stairs. Troy clutches the rail with both hands and descends sideways. Two steps, rest. Two steps, rest. I cradle his elbow in my palm.

We’re on the second floor of one of those open-air complexes that’s wrapped around a few messy beds of tropical greenery and a tiny swimming pool. The sun only shines on the water for an hour or so in the middle of the day, when it’s directly overhead. This early, the pool is still in shadow. The deck chairs are empty, and a beer can drifts aimlessly in the deep end.

“You’re doing great,” I say to Troy when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

He’s better on level ground, more sure of himself. We walk past the mailboxes to the gate and push out of the complex into the bright, blaring morning. Gardeners are doing their thing all up and down the street, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, and a disgruntled garbage truck snatches up dumpsters, flips them over to empty them, then slams them back to the pavement.

It was hot yesterday, and it’s supposed to be hotter today. Troy wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He hikes up his pajama bottoms and sets off stiff-legged down the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard, his arms extended out from his sides to help him balance.

“Damn, man,” I say. “You sprinkle speed on your Wheaties?”

“I’ve got to start taking care of myself,” he huffs. “If I don’t do something about my weight, I’ll be dead in five years. And I don’t want to die.”

“Me neither,” I say, “I don’t want to die either,” but that’s a lie. Sometimes I do.

Troy only makes it as far as the liquor store before running out of steam. A hundred yards. He leans against the building and gulps air like a flopping fish. His face is bright red, and his Lakers jersey is soaked with perspiration. I ask if he’s okay.

“Will you go in and get me a Coke?” he says, fishing in his pocket for a dollar. “Diet.”

I bring the soda out to him. He drains it quickly, and we start back to the apartment.

“Tomorrow I’ll go a little farther,” he says. “And the day after that, even farther.”

I’m pulling for the man, definitely, but I remember the hypnosis clinic, Berlin, and the lottery, so the best I can do for now is humor him.

A lemon drops off a tree and rolls across the sidewalk. I nearly trip and fall trying to get out of the way. Time for bed.

I NEVER THOUGHT about life before mine started to go wrong. I just lived it, like everybody else. But then you lose your job, and your wife leaves you for the neighbor and takes your kids, and you go from whiskey to weed to coke to crack just like the commercials warn you will. You lie and cheat and steal until one night you find yourself holding a knife on this guy, Memo, who’s supposed to be your buddy, your partner in crime, and Memo gets the jump on you and gives you a concussion and you come to in jail the next day, bleeding out of your ear.

Stuff like that raises questions: Why me? What next? Where will it end?

THE SUBWAY I work at is half a block from a hospital, which is where most of our customers come from. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours, and I’m on from midnight to nine a.m. Some nights are dead, just me and the radio, and other nights it’s so crazy that I’m tempted to tear off my apron and call it quits. The reason I don’t is that this is what starting over is like. It’s hard. It’s minimum wage and night shifts and managers who are fifteen years younger than you.

I got this job after rehab, when I transitioned into a sober-living facility, and I’m still here, ten months later. The part of me that once made a hundred thousand a year and had four salesmen under him is unimpressed, but the part of me that was living in a park and breaking into vending machines for dope money can’t thank me enough.

Two Korean teenagers slink into the restaurant around 2:30 a.m. One of them is holding a bloody T-shirt to his shoulder. He slumps, pale and silent, in a booth while his friend orders sandwiches.

“Your buddy all right?” I ask.

“He got shot,” the kid at the counter replies. “We’re going to Kaiser after.”

People do this a lot, stop in on their way to the emergency room. They eat something first because they know they’ll have to wait hours to be seen. A guy came in a couple weeks ago with a nail through his foot. He’d been messing around drunk with a friend’s tools. Said it didn’t hurt except where the nail was touching bone.

I check the booth after the kids leave, wipe away a smear of blood. My favorite show is on the radio, After Midnight . The host is talking to a man who found a hole in the ground that he claims is a portal into hell. He lowered a microphone into it and recorded the screams of the tortured souls.

“That’s ancient Latin,” the man who discovered the hole says.

“What are they saying?” the host asks.

“‘Save me.’”

About four a woman comes in and orders a cup of coffee. It’s rare I get a lone female at this hour, and when I do, she’s usually bundled up like an Eskimo and pushing a shopping cart. This chick is gorgeous. Arab. Armenian, maybe. Tall and thin with olive skin and long black hair. She’s wearing jeans and a pink blouse, a white sweater over that.

“You work at the hospital?” I ask as I slide her cup across the counter.

“No,” she says with some kind of accent. “My daughter is there.”

I notice that her eyes are red and swollen and that her mascara is smeared, and I feel bad. Here she is, going through some sort of tragedy, and I was imagining what she’d look like naked.

“No charge,” I say, waving away her money.

“Please,” she says. “Take it.”

“Really. My treat.”

She pushes the bills into the tip jar. Her fingernails have been chewed to the quick. She sits in the booth by the window and stares out at the electric orange night. A bus blows past full of people going to work, and I begin to prep for the morning rush. After an hour, the woman tosses her cup in the trash and calls out a thank-you as she leaves. The pale creep of dawn is filling in the blanks outside. Another goddamn Tuesday, gentlemen. Let’s make this one mean something.

I WALK WITH Troy again when I get home. He goes twice as far, almost to where Spaghetti Factory used to be, where they’re putting in more condos.

“I think I’m losing weight already,” he says.

I check my e-mail on his computer while he’s in the shower. There’s something from my son, who’ll be fourteen in September. Sick Shit is the subject. It’s a video of a kickboxer getting his leg broken in the ring, his knee snapping back the wrong way. I almost puke watching it. Every month or so the boy sends me something like this. Never a message, just a clip from YouTube, usually disturbing.