Last Night I Sang to the Monster (3 page)

Substance abuse. That was a joke me and my friends liked to make. We wanted to write a song about
substance abuse.
These are some of the lyrics I wrote when we were all stoned out of our heads:

You know, that song, it’s another one of those pieces of paper on the floor of my brain. Anyway, my friends, I really liked them. Antonio and Gloria and Tommy and Mitzie and Albert. God wrote
crazy
on their hearts when they were born. But it was good when I was with them. It was like we all belonged to each other.

And they were all really smart. I know people think that druggies are really nothing but a bunch of losers. But the truth is that the smartest kids, they’re the ones doing the drugs. We’re thinkers and we don’t like rules and we have imagination. All right, so we’re also all fucked up. But hey, you think sober people aren’t all fucked up? The world is being run by sober people—and it doesn’t look like it’s working out all that well. Just take me and tear me up.

My friends, they always made me laugh. Not that I remember a lot of the things we did together. We got smashed. But I didn’t feel alone—that’s
what counts. The rest of the time, I just felt like crying. You know, the word
sad
that’s written on my heart,
that
word.
Sad.
Yeah. Crying. Okay. But my friends made me laugh.

We played games. That was cool. We liked Scrabble. I think we were all sort of in love with words—but we liked to keep those words in our heads most of the time. We had this game. Every week, we’d pick a different word. They were like our own personal passwords—and we couldn’t tell anybody what our passwords were. At the end of each week, we’d pick a new word, and then we’d get high and yell out the old words, the words we were tossing out. I remember one time, these were the words we yelled out:

Some of the words were in Spanish and some of them were in English. Gloria and Antonio were really into speaking Spanish and even though I had a Mexican last name, it was a language that had been lost in my family. Yeah, well, a lot of things got lost in my family.

But with my friends, I didn’t feel lost. I liked our words, liked the sound of them as they floated out of their voices. As we got stoned out of our minds, we’d make up sentences using our words. The sentences sounded like entire stories to me. All week long I would write sentences in my head using our words.

It was like having little pieces of my friends in my head.

At home, well, things were not great. My mom was depressed. I don’t mean that in the regular sense. Sometimes people say things like, “Man, I’m really depressed.” But my mom, she was depressed in the clinical sense.
Not that you needed a psych doc to recognize her condition. I don’t know how it all started for her. Long before I was born, that’s for sure. I grew up taking her to different psych docs. She liked to change doctors. That really tore me up.

I started driving when I was thirteen. Not that I knew what I was doing—but I got the hang of it. The thing of it was that my mom could never drive when she was having what my father called “episodes.” Driving without a license? That’s nothing.

My mom, she was always on some kind of medication, and things would be okay for a while. She’d cook and clean the house and stuff like that—but then for some reason, she would stop taking her medications. I never really understood that. I’m not her.

I could always tell when she got off her meds because she’d hug me and tell me that she was well now. “It’s all going to be lovely, Zach.” Lovely. I hate that word.

I don’t remember a lot of things about growing up. I spent a lot of time playing in the backyard. I think I remember being in love with a tree. That’s weird, I know, but there are worse things than being in love with a tree. Trees are very cool. And they’re alive. More alive than some people.

We used to have a dog. Her name was Lilly. She slept with me. When I was about five, I found her sleeping under the tree, the tree I was in love with. But she wouldn’t wake up. I was yelling and crying and just, you know, going mental.

My dad came out. He saw Lilly. He smelled like the bourbon he’d been drinking. “Dogs die,” he said. And then he walked back into the house—to get himself another drink.

I remember lying down next to Lilly. After a while I just got up and dug a grave. It took me a long time. But I couldn’t just leave Lilly lying there. It wasn’t right.

I kept asking if I could have another dog but my mom said they were too much trouble. Like she knew. My mom, she didn’t know a thing about taking care of dogs. I mean she didn’t even know anything about taking care of boys. Boys, as in Zach. Not that it mattered. I managed. Look, I’m being mean to my mom. I hate that, when I’m mean. She had to deal with
a lot of stuff. I know that. What Adam calls the internal-life stuff. I know it’s hell. Believe me, I know. Shit. I wish I didn’t. But there it is.

My mom, mostly she stayed inside a dark room that was all hers. She had agoraphobia. That’s what my dad said. Just like her sister. I guess it ran in her family.

Agoraphobia. That was another way of saying that she was allergic to the sky.

When she was feeling okay, she’d leave her room and talk to me. I remember this one time she said: “Zach, you’re just like me. You know that, don’t you?” I looked at my mom and tried to smile. Look, smiling is hard for me. “You are,” she said. “You even have my smile.” Shit.

And then she kissed me. “I miss you.” She said it like I had gone somewhere. I wanted to say, “I miss you too.” I mean, she
had
gone somewhere. And then she said, “I miss everyone.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Your father doesn’t touch me anymore.”

Wig me out. It was none of my business whether my parents touched each other or not.

And then she looked at me and said, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” She squeezed my arm. “Zach, you can touch me if you want.”

My heart was beating really fast and I felt as if my heart was freezing up, like it was in the middle of a storm and there were things running through my mind, things that were stomping on me, telling me things I didn’t want to know—bad things—and I wanted to take a bat to my own brain. I didn’t, I mean, I just didn’t know what to do so I just smiled at her and nodded. God, there I was with a stupid smile and I hated myself and I thought that maybe there was a knife inside of me, trying to cut me up. I don’t know how I did it, but I did it—I got up and got my book bag. “I have a study session with Antonio and Gloria.” I was trembling and I don’t know how I made myself move or talk or do anything.

“Do you have to go?” She sounded like a little girl. It was like she was begging me to stay. I was breathing so damn fast that I couldn’t breathe. I know that doesn’t make any sense.

I needed something.
I really needed something.
I found my feet
moving towards Tommy’s house. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been there.

“Dude,” he said, “You look really weirded out, man. I mean, you could really use something.”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

That was the first time I did coke.

My body, it was electric. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had a real heart and a real body and I knew that there was this fire in me that could have lit up the entire universe. No book had ever made me feel that way. No human being had ever made me feel like that.

God, it was incredible to feel so perfect. Look, God didn’t write the word
perfect
on my heart. But cocaine did what God didn’t. Wow.
Perfect.

I was on fire. I mean it.
On fire!
The truth is that I wanted to die. It would have been beautiful to die feeling so alive. I knew I’d never be that perfect again.

I’m riding a tricycle. I’m four. What I’m remembering must be a dream because I have lots of brothers and sisters. I’m wearing a white shirt and black pants and nice dress shoes that hurt my feet. I’m playing with all my brothers and sisters on my dad’s perfect lawn.

I just want to be alone. I walk away from everyone and I find this very cool tricycle. I start riding it and I’m singing to myself. I’m happy. I look back and see that all my brothers and sisters and my mom and my dad are all piling into the car. My mom is carrying a present. It’s really pretty with a white silk ribbon. And then the car drives away.

I wave at them. Bye. Bye. I keep riding my tricycle. I keep singing. I’m happy. I don’t like it when there’s a lot of noise.

But then, the car comes back and my mother says. “Where were you?”

And I say, “I was here.”

“You scared us. We didn’t know where you were. You’re a bad boy scaring me like that.”

She sounds really, really mad. “I’m sorry,” I say. I feel a knot in my stomach.

And my mom says, “You’re a bad boy.”

I want to know why I’m a bad boy. Sometimes, that’s what I say:
Zach, you’re a bad boy.
That’s really weird, I know. I tear myself up sometimes.

It’s not as if my dad was the only father in the world who drank.

He worked hard and he never missed work. Not ever. Every day, up at 5:30 in the morning, making his own coffee, making his own lunch, going to work.

And, hell, at the end of the day, the guy was all beat to shit. Sometimes, he came in after work and he could barely talk he was so tired. He’d take a shower and pour himself a drink. He didn’t hook up with other women and stuff like that. He stuck it out, took care of us. So the guy drank. Hey, there are worse things. And look, my mom, she could be great, but there were days she just sat there, tears rolling down her face. She wasn’t very interactive.

Santiago came home and made noise, threatening to kill us all, then laughed, stoned, that guy. Crazy. But he always took off. And left us to our quiet house.

The really sad part was that I was afraid of my mom. That’s not normal. You think I don’t know that? Sometimes, I would sit next to her and ask her if she needed anything and she would look at me like I was some kind of demon and she would just slap me. The first time she did that I went to my room and cried. I was a lot younger then. But after a while I sort of expected it. One time, she really went crazy and wouldn’t stop slapping me. And then she cried and cried and I felt really bad for her. I knew that she didn’t mean it. But the whole situation didn’t make me want to come too close. And then there was that conversation about touching that I
just couldn’t get out of my mind.

But there were good days too, days when she would get up early and make breakfast and clean and cook the most amazing meals for dinner. But the last time we had a dinner together, it didn’t work out too well. She’d spent all afternoon making homemade ravioli. “I wanted to be Italian. Instead, I was just a boring girl from Ohio.” My mom was a lot of things. But she wasn’t boring. Boring would have been really great.

So that night, we were enjoying her ravioli and everything was going really good. My dad was making jokes, trying to make my mom laugh, and my mom, she was smiling. God, she could smile. And Dad wasn’t too drunk and, you know, I was starting to feel a little relaxed. I’m not a relaxed kind of guy. I’m all tied up in knots. You know, around here they call that anxiety. And, well, I’m on some meds for that. Look, I think God wrote
anxious
on my heart.

But that night, I was starting to feel chilled. It all fell apart when my brother Santiago came home, stoned out of his mind. He was seriously crazed. He looked at all of us and yelled, “Typical. No one fucking invited me.” I mean, the guy lived there.
He was always invited.

My brother really tore me up. He looked right at my mom and said, “It’s about fucking time you cooked.” He spit on her plate and then started in on my dad, throwing cuss words around like confetti. His words were flying all over the room. He grabbed my dad’s plate and threw it across the room and it shattered against the wall.

And then my mom, she immediately went back to her internal life, to that place where she lived. I just sat there, hoping my brother wouldn’t go after me. But of course he did. “Suckass.” He made this sucking thing with his lips. “You got any money, suckass?”

He knew I always had a few bucks on me. It was like I was the guy’s ATM machine. I reached into my wallet and pulled out two twenties.

“That all you got?”

“Yeah.” I tried to pretend I wasn’t scared.