The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (28 page)

Her fantasies are getting the better of her. Her doctor prescribes Prozac and tells her she might think about taking a little trip. “Sure,” she nods. “I'm sure there's a hotel room available in hell,” she says to him with all the sarcasm she can muster.

“Just try the drugs,” he says, not amused. “And come back in a month.”

Blue is finishing up the last of the drywall. He who could never get a grip on a circular saw seems perfectly competent when it comes to building his own empire. With the help of a small business loan he's transformed the tiny, dank basement shop into something colourful and inviting. He cranks up some metal death thrash, cracks open a beer, and toasts the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. It's his big day.

Amy arrives after her shift, carrying a giant pumpkin and bundles of flowers.

“We're not girlifying the place, okay, baby?” he says to her.

She gives him a mock sulk, and he's forced to relent. She arranges bunches of dogwood in clay pots while he tattoos the pumpkin.

Blue's got the same metal death thrash in his truck. Emma can't stand it, but she turns up the volume anyway because the music reminds her of Blue on those rare occasions when he's happy. She's driving his truck to the brewery to pick up beer for the grand opening of Dyeing Arts. She doesn't drive like a girl, despite what Blue says, but
she admittedly doesn't drive well. She chain-smokes in order to calm her nerves.

Blue's giving away beer and condoms and free tattoos as door prizes that night. The place is smoky, booming, and Elaine is there, sporting the blackest clothes in her wardrobe, doing her maternal best to cope with the situation. Her son is turning out to be a bit of a local celebrity. The
Niagara Falls Herald
ran an article about local artists on the weekend, and among them they featured her son—spray-painting “Dyeing Arts” across the window of his shop. She is proud, but she's a little alarmed by the sight of Blue's new friends. His friends are new, and so is his confidence.

Blue is soaring above the crowd, waving his arms in the air and laughing as if he's just discovered how good it feels to do so. Emma is too naive to realize this is not just the exhilaration of the opening, but a good two hundred dollars' worth of chemicals. Amy is playing cocktail waitress in a transparent black tank top and army fatigues. Her hair has started to grow in and is an altogether arresting shade of orange.

At the end of the night, Amy and Emma pick up plastic cups and mop the floor while Blue stands on the dental chair and tells them his theory of earth's place in the universe. All they catch is something about cupcakes. They're ready for bed, but he's still wired. He's off with Billy to an after-hours club to drink tequila.

Amy sprays disinfectant on the countertop and says, “You know, it's getting kind of heavy.”

“What's that?” Emma asks her.

“The coke.”

Emma is stunned. Feels like an idiot. Wonders what else she's been missing. “Seriously?” she says, looking at Amy.

“It's not good. I mean, it's okay at the time because he's on top of the world, but then he gets so depressed the next day. Beats himself up, says he's worthless.”

The word kicks a hole in Emma's stomach. “Worthless” was a word Oliver was fond of using—a vast, catch-all word like a pit into which Blue often tripped and fell.

“And things are really just beginning to happen for him,” Amy sighs.

The drugs help—they lay down wooden planks over the gaping abyss beneath her. The drugs help, but bigger help comes in the form of vindication.

“Courier dropped this off for you earlier today,” says Ruthie.

Emma's never seen herself as someone grown up enough to receive a courier package so she thinks it must be a mistake. But no, that's her name there, and the return address is somewhere in Peru. Could Oliver be in South America?

“Why don't you stop agonizing us both and open the sucker,” Ruthie says.

Emma tears the envelope open. It's a handwritten letter and a map. The letter is signed Nick. “It's from Professor Rocker,” she tells Ruthie.

“Oh no,” Ruthie groans.

“But listen to this—he's writing to apologize.”

“Get out.”

“Here,” Emma says, starting to read.

Blue seems to be retreating from the material world. There is material all right, and money, but what he doesn't spend in the dental supply store he seems to be spending on coke. The more success he is having with the shop, the more whacked out and inaccessible he's becoming.

He doesn't see it that way. He's floating on chemicals and relative success. It's a disembodied reality: Big Lou and Baby Blue and the angry guy in the middle who disagrees with them both. But the guy in the middle's got his finger poised on a red button. He's ready to blow them all up. He's waiting for the right moment. He's waiting until Blue's got more plates stacked up before he trips him. Blue never looks in the mirror now. The image he sees is a fireball of nervous energy, electric yellow, emitting bitter shocks like bee stings. “Fuck off, man,” he says to himself.

At night, Blue brags that people all the way across the country have heard of Dyeing Arts, but during the day, he is irritable and withdrawn. When Emma visits him on weekends, she tries to talk sense to him, but it only seems to make him more sullen. Mentioning the drug use just makes him angry. He tells her to get off his back, stay out of
his business, chill out, get a life. It's not easy holding it together. He doesn't need the added pressure of his sister's moralizing. What does she know? The drugs are part of the territory. Using, selling, tattooing, it's all one and the same.

To Emma, though, it seems like Blue doesn't care about anybody but himself at the moment. There are the depressing daytime visits with him, but there are also the wild nights. Nights when he calls her at 3 a.m., coming down from whatever planet he's just visited, and cries, “Em, Em, I love you so much, I'm so awful, everything's so awful,” into the phone. She tries her best to comfort him, tells him he'll feel better in a few hours, but he drones on and on without interruption; without the possibility of taking in anything another human could offer. It usually ends up in the same place, with Blue talking about Oliver, calling him a fucking bastard and coward.

Emma agrees.

Blue even turns up at her residence more than once in the middle of the night—having run or flown or however he gets there from Niagara Falls—laughing or crying, or most often both, prattling on, sad and angry. It's monologues he spews. They're all in his own voice, but in his head there's a three-way conversation happening. His father telling him he's a loser and a fuck-up, the baby boy who's cowering under his blows, and the angry guy in the middle who tells Oliver he wants to kill him but turns around and punches the baby boy instead.

Blue needs an audience, but he won't speak when he's sober.

“Blue,” she has to say to him more than once, “please don't smoke that joint in here. Come on—you know I could get chucked out for that.”

The third time she says it, he puts his steel-toed boot straight through her door.

“That brother of yours is a fucking asshole,” Ruthie says in no uncertain terms when she sees Emma taping a pad of paper over the hole in the door the next day.

He may well be, Emma thinks, but that doesn't give Ruthie the right to say anything. That's Emma's right—family privilege.

“He needs some help. He's gonna blow,” Ruthie continues.

“Ruthie!” Emma shouts from the floor. “Quit it, okay?” she says in exasperation.

“Well, you're the one who's going to end up with a whole lot of lava in your lap,” Ruthie says.

“But what am I supposed to do? You mention getting help, you mention the drugs, and he goes ballistic!”

“Don't indulge him.”

“Indulge him?”

“Tell him you won't listen to his shit.”

I can't do that, thinks Emma. If I did that, I might lose him. But what else can she do? She can't force him to get help, she can't threaten him. She can't get Elaine involved because Elaine's busy having her own crisis. Seems things with her man Richard weren't as peachy as Elaine made them sound. Seems he cut off the support he was giving Elaine because he was going to have to pay alimony. Seems he's leaving his wife—but not for Elaine.

“You can take your lousy money and buy yourself a hooker for all I care!” Elaine had screamed into the phone. Emma knew that much, because her mother had slurred it over the phone to her. She was back on the bottle and she was making it sound like
she told him, she told him good
.

Emma didn't know the most tragic part of it all. Elaine had called Richard up at work because she hadn't heard from him in nearly two weeks. She'd just finished her first short story. She thought it was pretty good. She was really excited, wanted to fax it to him, but rather than enthusiasm she got the big kiss-off instead. She ended up slamming the phone down, shredding the story, and throwing it into the garbage disposal. “What's wrong with me?” she screamed at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. “Why does it have to be like this?” she sobbed into the sink now clogged with paper pulp.

Amy calls Emma from Niagara Falls one Monday night. She sounds despondent when she tells Emma that Blue didn't show up at work that day. “He's never done anything like this before,” Amy sighs. “Do you think you'll come down this weekend?” she asks. Emma would prefer to avoid it, prefer to keep some distance. “I think he's really depressed,” Amy continues. “Maybe it'll help to see you. You know how it feels to be depressed. And you feel better, right?”

“I doubt it'll help to see me,” Emma says. “He thinks I'm being preachy and moralistic. Last time I saw him, he punched a hole in my door.”

“He promised me he was going to stop doing shit like that,” says Amy. “We've been through this over and over again. He's fucking up,” she sighs. “It's always like this—whenever things start to go well, he starts to lose it.”

The next Saturday morning Emma heads back to Niagara Falls. She doesn't really want to, she has made a pact with herself to wait for an apology from Blue, but because Amy sounds so flat, so uncharacteristically helpless, she has agreed to go.

In their apartment, Emma changes into one of Blue's sweatshirts and crawls into their bed. While Amy cleans the apartment, Emma looks around their bedroom, waiting for Blue to get home. His teddy bear—one he made in home economics in seventh grade—sits atop two books on a broken chair:
Everything You Need to Know About Growing Mushrooms Hydroponically
and some self-help guide on anger management. She doubts he bought the latter for himself.