Katya drank like I drink. Or maybe like I do drugs. She sent herself to the hospital. Nik would get the call. Katya, poisoned with alcohol, out in a coma at Miami Valley Hospital. This would be on an evening when Nik has invited her over for a quiet evening. Katya had come over, flaunting her sexuality in Nik’s face, then she’d suggest some wild sexual deviance. When Nik turned her down, Katya would storm out, slamming the door to Nik’s apartment. Then Nik would wait for the call.
Then I would hear the same sad story from Nik about how Katya did this, Katya did that. It seemed like a luxury problem to me but I’m sure that’s how my endless alcohol stories strike Nik: me, lying face down in the parking lot beside Inferno, Baker holding my hair. To me that story’s hardly worth telling. To Nik, it seemed an eventful night. To Nik, all his Katya stories were just part of his life. To me, they were beauty bordering on vanilla, all of them involving Katya drinking in Dayton while Nik stayed home—he knew what they’d be doing if he went out with her. They’d be drinking together except Katya at three times the rate. Nik would have one glass of wine. Katya would take the rest of the bottle. That such a person worked as a bartender..it was par for the course. She kept it reasonable while she was behind the bar. As soon as the place closed Katya jumped to “fun side” and she drank herself into a position where she could not: keep a secret, talk intelligibly, drive. That’s when Nik’s phone blew up. A hundred messages a night. The end of this assault by Katya was either that Nik would drive her home, or on especially fun nights, that he would tell her to walk the five blocks to his apartment. Of course she would try to drive it. Nik knew this. It was that hour of the day that turned Nik’s hair gray.
When Baker picked me up I was sitting alone in front of Pacchia. Nik had gone to the Jazz Room. Baker reached over and opened the door.
“Get in, Kimosabe.”
“You know what makes me feel comfortable?”
“What,” Baker says.
“Being with Nik, then being with you. Nik’s life is kind of formal and high class. When I’m with him, then with you, I feel like someone lowered the air pressure. I can breathe out.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Baker says, mimicking Morpheus.
I didn’t tell her that went both ways. What Baker possessed in the way of low-brow animal fucking tourism, Nik made up for in being an equal—he always had money to spend. And, being that I always had money to spend, and Nik was one of my friends who had a real job, Nik could introduce me to exotic drinks and restaurants like no one on Baker’s level could—yes, it really was like that.
“We going to your parents’ house?”
“You always call them my parents. That’s my aunt and uncle’s house.”
“Did I say parents before? Why didn’t you correct me?”
“A girl gets tired of correcting you on a years-old fact that you’ve been messing up forever.”
I look at her for signs of tears. Her eyes leave the road and I see her face turn sour.
“I’m just kidding!” She slaps the steering wheel. “We’re almost there! And don’t ask me where we’re going. It’s bad luck. Like seeing the bride in her wedding dress before the wedding day!”
“I don’t think it’s like that at all.”
“I know you don’t think it’s like that at all. That’s ‘cause you have too firm a set of metaphors. You think if an analogy is in any way loose that it doesn’t fit at all! Everything with you is tight and rigorous. Fuck that, man!”
I shake my head and prefer to keep my responses to her loose metaphors to myself. Anything I say there will likely be returned to me as evidence that Baker is right. I mean the girl is always right, huh?—The girl is always fucking right.
“Where is this?” I ask as Baker pulls to a stop next to a playground on the edge of a large field.
“It’s a park. If you want to know the name you can read about it on that sign over there where the street..and the grass..meet.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Oh-ho. Since you must know, in addition to this being a very nice place to hang out when it’s dark, this is also a fine place for me to make a phone call—”
“Oh! You’re gonna get us back into your house so we don’t have to sleep at your parents—err, aunt and uncle’s—house. Yes? Good! Yes?? Good!!”
“You are high as a motherfucker,” Baker tells me.
But I say: “Higher.”
“Let’s not argue, my friend.”
“Fuck it. All I’m telling you is it isn’t high as a motherfucker, it’s higher than a motherfucker.”
“You know, you say that now but I think once my legs are wrapped around you, and you’re feeling that pussy from the inside, once you’re as deep as a knee in pussy—”
“It’s not deep as a knee!” I say, but I stop there as nothing I say will ever correct Baker’s dumb-kitten misuse of idiomatic phrases. Let her tell me about “her hypoglycemic” until the day is done and I will take a ticket to ride that glorious pussy deep into the nighttime.
Robert sets herself up sitting on a picnic table: she drops the car keys and her phone on top of it. Lights a cig. Picks up her phone and calls.
I sit next to her but I’m on the table’s bench seat and Baker and I are facing opposite directions, looking at each other.
“Hello. Brooklyn,” Baker takes a long drag off her cigarette. “I know it’s late and Matthew and I have found another place to stay for tonight—it’s alright! We found another place to stay—Yes, with my aunt and uncle. What difference does it make? To you. Who else? I mean who else would it matter to? Whatever! Why are you kicking me out of our house? Just when my friend came to visit? There’s not going to be any problem. Who? When Rambuncto comes? Matt is a gentle person, he’s not going to start a fight. Why would Rambuncto do that? All we wanted to do with you two is snort some coke? And—I mean, not to put a fine point on it—but Matthew has the money. That we’re going to use to buy the coke. Yes! Yes. He came here to have a nice peaceful weekend with me and to meet you and for the three of us to do some coke together. That’s it. And for me and him to have sex. You think Rambuncto will be jealous. Of Matt? Then tell him to close his beady little eyes and forget about what it’s like fucking me. Isn’t Rambuncto with you? What the fuck, girl! Tell him to stop. Even if Matthew wasn’t here I still wouldn’t give it up to Rambunction Style. No. Never going back. Get ahold of your man, Brooklyn! It ain’t my problem..your boy..has the hots for me.”
I get up from the picnic table. Step out from underneath the pavilion where the tables are. The field is lit by street lamps. My mind is tumbling, tumbling. Tumbling down from its position across from Nik at our fancy restaurant and our fancy company and our fancy conversation style. I am falling from the coke, needing more, thinking of pulling it out right here in the park—
“Nah ah!” Baker says. “Don’t even think about it. Wait till we get home.”
I look at her, then at my hands, then at the vial around my neck.
“How did you—?”
Baker taps her head with the phone. It reminds me of seeing her in color guard all those years ago.
“I can feel what you think,” she says. Then she goes back to Brooklyn: “No! No! You’re a two-bit whore smacking up the side of two one-eyed jacks spanking your Little Baby Faulkner until it can’t breathe, Brookly—It can’t!! Let the fucker breathe!”
I turn my back on Baker and I think about three things: 1) the white Rabbit sitting up there on the road, 2) the keys to the Rabbit, set beside Baker on the picnic table, and 3) a wild fantasy from which I can get out of this shit. Feeling truly alone and like I made a mistake coming here. This is a feeling I get on adventures sometimes: that palpable desire to cling to the side of the bridge that I left from—a half step—so scared that I won’t have blankets or a pillow or a bed to sleep in tonight. That as I wander, I won’t have food. That Baker and I aren’t actually going to have great sex this weekend, that I’m with the wrong girlfriend—I long for the security of a well-paying programming job but then the well-paying part isn’t enough for me. The idea that someday I’ll become homeless and be a homeless fucking drug addict once who went to film school. Once who had high-class friends like Nik and low-class ones like Baker.
I could grab those keys and get in that car and be gone across America, halfway back to LA by the time Baker thought about reporting the car stolen. Her wondering face as I drive away from this park, every minute I don’t do anymore coke another minute I am sobering up. Stop in New Mexico or something, abandon film school, and squalor in the sand forever.