I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

Copyright © 2016 by Mishka Shubaly.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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.

Book design by Jeff Williams

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shubaly, Mishka, author.

Title: I swear I'll make it up to you: a life on the low road / Mishka Shubaly.

Description: New York, New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015040867| ISBN 9781610395595 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shubaly, Mishka. | Rock musicians—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | SELF-HELP / Substance Abuse & Addictions / Alcoholism. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Running & Jogging.

Classification: LCC ML420.S542 A3 2016 | DDC 782.42166092—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040867

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my sisters, Tashina and Tatyana

Contents

Prologue

chapter one
Sucker Punch

chapter two
Chemical Youth

chapter three
Working-Class Zero

chapter four
The Potato Peelings in the Sink Did Not Turn into Vodka as I Had Hoped

chapter five
The Graveyard of Dreams

chapter six
Are We Going to Be Judged on These Lonely Deeds?

chapter seven
The End of the End

chapter eight
Breaking the Beast

chapter nine
Congratulations, You've Rejoined the Human Race

chapter ten
Longest Day

chapter eleven
Darkest Night

chapter twelve
The New Life

          
Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?

          
I'm a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood

          
They're gonna kill me, Mama

          
They don't like me, bud.

—
JOHN PRINE

Prologue

              
People misremember things. Even if I remember it wrong, this is how I remember it.

—MURRAY SHUBALY

O
ne Sunday morning when I was twenty-two, I was working my way home from a Saturday night out—badly hungover, a trail of orange vomit descending from the collar of my Salvation Army T-shirt all the way down across my Salvation Army pants to the tops of my Salvation Army shoes. When the No. 2 train pulled up at 14th Street, Anne, a girl I had gone to school with, was standing on the train directly in front of me. I hadn't seen her since I was seventeen, when I'd cheated on my then girlfriend, Riley, with her. As the doors opened, I gave Anne my most winning smile. She surveyed me wistfully.

“Oh, Mishka,” she said as she brushed past with a grimace, “you haven't changed a bit.”

I boarded the train and rode uptown in silence. I had moved to the city less than a year earlier in order to claim the fame I was sure awaited me. Instead, I'd had to prostrate myself just to find a job I felt beneath my unique gifts, a job I loathed: data entry in the
Women's Apparel Department at Bergdorf Goodman, New York's most ostentatious department store. I shared a one-room apartment with my stepbrother, Jesse, the most cramped living conditions I'd ever endured for the highest rent I had ever paid. My mother and my younger sister lived in the Virgin Islands, and I saw them one week a year at most. I hadn't spoken to my older sister or my father in years. I was badly heartbroken, still madly in love with Riley, who had disappeared without a word when I was twenty.

When I emerged onto the 96th Street subway platform to transfer to a local train, a man was playing steel drums. The song was at once light and droning, uplifting and plaintive, foreign and intimately familiar, defiant and inexpressibly sad. I was so light-headed and woozy that I couldn't make out the tune at first. It was “Amazing Grace.” The song's lyrics rattled into my dehydrated brain without even being sung, and with them, a terrible epiphany.

In the airless cloister of the subway platform, I wept: suddenly, copiously, uncontrollably, in the same manner I had upchucked my malt liquor and Nacho Cheese Doritos the night before. I didn't know how to live—anywhere, but especially in the big city. My greatest comfort—my alcohol—had begun to terrify me. My teenage arrogance had been beaten out of me. I had been humbled. I was lost.

As a child, I had learned from my mother's Arlo Guthrie cassette that “Amazing Grace” had been written by a slave trader. The story goes that this slave trader picked up his human cargo on the coast of western Africa and set sail for America. But when he reached the middle of the ocean, he had an epiphany—I have made a
horrible
mistake—and he turned the ship around. He returned to Africa, set the people he had abducted free, and devoted his life to fighting against slavery.

Envision this majestic and baffling spectacle: a massive, ancient, handmade wooden ship, under full sail on an ocean bare of land or any sign of humanity, gradually slowing down, then hesitating for a moment, as if in deep contemplation. Then the cumbersome mast
swings about, and the mammoth vessel ascribes a slow, wide circle and returns back the way it came, as if under the pull of a bigger force.

Sadly, the slave trader narrative behind “Amazing Grace” is untrue. The song was indeed written by a slave trader named John Newton, but he had no crisis of conscience at sea involving the ethics of slavery. John Newton did experience a spiritual conversion in 1748 during a fierce storm, but no ship turned around, and no one was freed. In fact, Newton was a hellion with a well-documented pattern of coming close to death, swearing to change his life, then enthusiastically plunging back into debauchery, blasphemy, and a level of creative profanity that made even his fellow sailors cringe.

After Newton's conversion, he continued to work as a slave trader and continued to mistreat his slaves until 1754, when he became physically unable to do so following a stroke. Even then, he continued to invest in slave trading operations for many years. Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” in 1773, and he did
finally
speak out against slavery . . . but only after he had made his fortune enslaving his fellow human beings.

Still, grace exists. You flail around, you stumble, you weep in public on subway platforms, the cries of trains in your ears, knifing pains in your gut, and orange vomit on your shirt. You get it wrong and you get it wrong and you get it wrong . . . and then one day, somehow, you find your way.

CHAPTER 1

Sucker Punch

O
ne of those swampy, hollowed-out nights in August when anyone with a means of escape has fled New York City and everyone left behind is ready to kill or die, anything to interrupt the boredom and the heat. I was behind the bar making change for Eddie the bartender when we heard the unmistakable sound of Something Going Wrong in a Bar—chairs scraping, the clatter of something falling over, grunts of exertion, the heavy, meaty sound of blows, women squawking. I whipped around and saw the arm of a man in a white long-sleeve shirt rising and falling over someone flat on the ground.

Eddie and I sprinted from behind the bar. Eddie grabbed the guy's arm, and I got him in a choke hold and dragged him toward the door. I'd lost control of a bar I was managing once before, and the entire room turned on me. I got put through a wall and was lucky to come out of it with just a black eye. My old friend Javad was working the door, and we'd been hanging out all night—where the hell was he now that we needed him?

I heaved the guy outside and shoved him away from me into the street so I'd have warning if he charged me. I was surprised by how preppy he looked—somewhere between Dave Eggers and
Timothy Bottoms from
The Last Picture Show
. He shot me a black look and walked off. These guys fighting were probably just day traders blowing off steam about something I didn't understand, points and percentages and percentages of points. So make up an ice pack for the bump on the chin of the other dude, buy him a drink or two, and just get through the night.

When I went back inside, I found Javad. He was lying on the floor, eyes closed, body motionless, face flat and lifeless. Javad was one of the first friends I'd made when I'd moved to New York twelve years earlier. I dropped to my knees. Eddie cradled Javad's head and called his name. There was blood in his mouth and an egg on the back of his head from where he'd hit the floor. Someone touched a piece of ice to his forehead. Slowly, Javad opened his eyes.

After we'd turned the lights on for the paramedics and they had taken Javad off in an ambulance, we watched the incident on the security cameras. The man in the white button-down had been bothering a woman with curly hair in the back. She came and talked to Javad at the front door—an Australian man was bothering her, she'd told him. Javad had politely asked the Australian to leave. As Javad was escorting the man to the door, the curly-haired woman started talking trash to her antagonist. Javad turned his head to tell her to shut it, and the Aussie sucker-punched him, knocking him out, then continued wailing on him after he'd fallen to the floor, unconscious.

At the end of my shift, I was still too rattled to bike home to Brooklyn. I couldn't even decompress with a couple of drinks. After nearly twenty years of drinking, I'd made it sober for a couple of months, and I knew that even one beer would be my complete undoing. I left my bike chained to a light post and took a cab home, my heart still racing.

My cell phone rang in the cab. Javad was calling me from the ER. He'd just realized he was chewing the same piece of gum he'd been chewing when he got coldcocked—should he hang on to it
for forensic evidence? I could hear him grinning on the other end of the phone. At least the blow hadn't knocked any sense into him.

I awoke the next morning in a black rage. This Australian asshole, this amateur, this poorly tipping
tourist
had attacked my friend without provocation and gotten off scot-free. I'd had him in my hands, and I'd let him go. I should have pulped his face.

I had to get my bike. I threw on the clothes that were on my floor and an ancient pair of Adidas indoor soccer shoes, the leather stiff and cracked from a job pouring concrete. I walked out into the stifling heat.

When I'd moved into this apartment, I was determined to insulate my neighbors from the chaos of my life, not something I'd excelled at in the past. My previous living situation, I'd woken up once on the sidewalk a block from my apartment, once directly in front of it, and once on the landing outside my door. My landlord grilled me: “I can never tell if you're running on blood or alcohol.” I should have pointed out to him that I was narrowing the margin of error, at least.

But I'd failed early and flamboyantly at this apartment, coming home at 5 a.m. covered in blood the day after I moved in. I'd had to knock on the landlady's first-floor window because I couldn't get my key to work.

There were three or four people standing at the bus stop, fanning themselves with newspapers. Between the heat radiating off the pavement, the exhaust from passing trucks, and the everyday Brooklyn stench of hot, wet garbage, it was like standing in front of a trash fire. Fuck waiting on a bus. I would run all the way into the city to get my bike.

I had never been a runner. I couldn't be bothered to run to catch a train. For as long as I could remember, “going on a run” meant I was going to the corner to buy beer or, if I was feeling particularly ambitious, across the street to the liquor store.

Even as a kid, running was only punishment, something you were forced to do for goofing off in PE class: “Shubaly. Shut your mouth and take a lap.” As an adult, the only time I engaged in running—that idiotic behavior where you flail your arms and legs around like you're drowning in the air—was when addressed directly by a police officer. But that blazing August afternoon, something broke in me. I began to run.

My shoes scuffed the pavement awkwardly or slapped down too hard. My tummy jiggled shamefully with each step. I passed the apartment of Shilpa, my former best friend and current nemesis. Our band had gotten right to the edge of doing something memorable, only to shit the bed at the very last second. In our last communication, she had challenged me to a fistfight. I later got a letter from her lawyer, threatening to sue me for over a million dollars.

I crossed McGuinness Avenue into Williamsburg and over a decade's worth of shitty memories. Brooklyn was a map of my disappointment, a city built of my failures. The bars I'd been fired from, the bars I'd been tossed out of, the bars I could never, ever return to. The ex-roommate whose last words for me had been a text that just read, “You are a speck of shit.” My oldest and most trusted friend, James, whom I hadn't spoken to in five years. The ex-friend who I knew was going to take a swing at me the next time he saw me for going home with his girl the night after they broke up. I feared the physical confrontation, not because I might lose—in which case I'd be getting the beating I deserved—but because I might snap on him and win. I'd caused enough injury.

Then, of course, there were the women. Women I'd spent a night or a couple of weeks or a couple of months with before retreating, women I'd stolen drugs from and who had stolen drugs from me, women I'd stormed out on in the middle of dates after pounding both our drinks, women who were mostly justified in hating my guts but who had only made sad eyes at me when they'd seen me staggering around at night or crawling home in the morning.

McCarren Park was the heart of Williamsburg. Summer weekends, it was the neighborhood's backyard, and everyone convened there: African American, Latino, Polish, Jewish, Italian families barbecuing or picnicking and playing softball or soccer or just hanging out. When I moved to New York in 1998, there had been a small number of kids from Ohio or Michigan or Montreal in black punk and heavy metal T-shirts who hung out in the southwest corner, close enough to conveniently nab a tall, powerful margarita in a Styrofoam cup from the Turkey's Nest. Each year, we grew more numerous and more dilute, no longer just rocker kids escaping dead-end towns but club kids, DJs, white dudes with dreads, “Internet entrepreneurs,” hacky sackers. Six years later, Young, White, and Not From Here seemed to have reached critical mass. Still, each year the infestation worsened, till the entire park was overrun, till the whole neighborhood became an open-air dormitory for adult children with platinum credit cards, pursuing their MDMA from Red Bull Academy.

The lone corner of resistance was the northern point of McCarren Park, devoted to older Polish men showcasing the four phases of alcohol's orbit. Some drank slyly out of bottles in brown paper or black plastic bags; some were openly shitfaced; some, already blacked out and snoring; some, freshly awoken, wincing at the sunshine, in grievous pain and eager to move into the next quarter.

Ten years ago, I had been one of those kids at the southwest end of the park in the rock T-shirts, scrambling and starving, looking to get loud and weird and fucked-up and maybe even write for a magazine. Ten years later, the only progress I'd made was a glacial migration of maybe eight hundred feet north—eight hundred feet removed from “hipster” and eight hundred feet closer to “homeless.”

Only minutes into my run, still an unthinkable distance from my bike, I could already feel things going wrong with my body. My T-shirt had cinched up in my armpits, and my floppy upper arms made wet clapping sounds against my torso. I could feel
each heartbeat reverberating throughout my body, trying to hammer down the walls of my skull. My face felt so hot it hurt. I kept running.

I had moved to the city at twenty-one with $300 and the naked ambition of becoming a famous writer and musician. In over a decade of hustling in the city, I had worked as an order-entry clerk, furniture mover, audio engineer, editor, customer service rep, ghostwriter, caterer, doorguy, trash picker, barback, bartender, talent buyer, envelope stuffer, night manager, ship's mate, carpenter, laborer, and office bitch. I had stopped short of gay-for-pay, but just barely. I'd learned to bitterly envy my friends with health insurance the way I once bitterly envied people in love.

The gigs I hadn't been fired from, I'd quit in a huff. Months or only weeks later, I'd move on in desperation to something even baser. And each one of those depressing, humiliating gigs had earned me more money than I'd made as a writer or musician. But then, everything had come a distant second to my true calling: waster.

For someone who had moved to NYC with the bald intention of getting famous, my anonymity remained so pristinely intact that one would think I'd been fighting to preserve it. (A reporter I knew once told me, “Man . . . you never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”) So many dreams I had neglected and then forgotten, like a child's old stuffed animals in a wet basement, their bodies filling with humidity, then mildew, then bugs, blossoming only in decay.

Some asshole pedaled by on a ridiculous bike built of three frames welded together, so he towered over cars, as high as a second-story window. He gave me a practiced “What are you staring at?” look.

I was staring at your dangerous, idiotic bike, you fucking imbecile, a bike you went to great lengths to construct not for its practical applications but so people would stare at you. And now I stare, and you're unhappy with that? Fuck you, I hate you, take your unicycle and your devil sticks and your FREE TIBET and just get the
fuck out of here, run back to the affluent DC suburb that spawned you. Fuck your boringly easy life, so vacuous that you must fill it with custom-built bike frames.

The aperture had narrowed to the point where my most reliable source of income was working off Craigslist, picking up stuff from the “free” section, then reposting it and selling it for $60 or $40 or hell, just give me $20, man, and get it out of here. I'd sold the contents of abandoned storage units and even worked a couple of days cleaning out the apartments of people who'd died. I kept any open bottles of liquor I found.

My friends had put in their time and pulled down six-figure salaries as admen or graphic designers or fashion whatevers. They were buying houses or apartments; they were getting married; they were having children. A few had hit it really big. I watched them on TV or read about them in
Rolling Stone
or the
New York Times
or the
New Yorker
. They'd written best sellers, or their bands had blown up, or they'd gotten their own show on HBO. One guy had even won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Fucking hell.

I was thirty-two and getting smaller every day. I didn't have a house or apartment or wife or girlfriend or child or even a real job. I worked off the books, I didn't have a lease, I was in the US on temporary status I'd been renewing since I was eight. My last name isn't a real name, just a bastardization of “Chevalier” that an illiterate French ancestor got stuck with by a hurried immigration official in the Ukraine. My first name isn't a real name but a child's nickname I never outgrew. I didn't have a 401(k), I didn't have a couch, I didn't have fucking ice cube trays. I owed $90,000 in student loans. One wall of my room was made up of two sheets. It wasn't just that I hadn't made it—I had nearly ceased to exist. Not dying, just slowly bleaching out, like old newsprint in the sunshine.

I had the music I'd written, songs about drinking with leitmotifs of heartbreak and despair to, you know, jazz it up a bit. I hadn't
been some refined, secret binge drinker or guilty closet drunk with nips of vodka squirreled away in a locked drawer of my desk; I
was
alcohol, the word made flesh. I had a tattoo of Drinky Crow in the center of my chest,
X's
on his eyes and a nameless bottle of poison tipped upright, draining into his craw. “Shubaly is a chronicler of mankind's darkest impulses and failures, a guy with a ticket to hell and back,” said one critic. “One listen will send an AA meeting into complete disarray,” said another. And my favorite, from comedian Doug Stanhope: “If you've ever considered suicide at happy hour, this is the songwriter for you.” I had lived with one foot in the gutter and the other in the grave, face down on the bar with both middle fingers in the air.