We All Fall Down

  “Look,” I tell her, as she starts taking me on a little tour around the workings of the shop. “I’ve definitely been in your position before, you know, having to break in the new guy, so I just wanted to say that you really don’t have to worry about me. I’ll figure it out as we go along, so you don’t need to stress at all.”

  She turns back, but without really looking at me. She’s got her eyes on the ground and her neck bent forward, so it’s like she’s talking out of her forehead.

  “Oh, sure, yeah right, you’ll figure it out on your own. I bet you took this job thinking it was gonna be real easy, didn’t you? Well, I’ll tell you right now, it ain’t. We work nonstop for eight hours a day or longer. We’re on our feet, moving all the time. If you’re looking for a job where you can just slack off, you’ve come to the wrong place, man. We work hard here. Most new people don’t even make it through the first week. I mean, have you ever even worked at a coffee shop like this before?”

  She stares me down with her forehead, jamming her hands into her pockets and hunching over a little more. I can’t quite make out her accent—Southern, for sure, but a whole lot different from Sue Ellen’s. It’s almost as if this Elaina girl has some sort of combination between a Southern drawl and a Midwestern twang. At least, her forehead does.

  “Sorry, no, I didn’t mean it like that at all.” I stutter like an idiot, trying my best to keep smiling. Hell, I mean, I should know by now that any powerless person who’s finally been given a temporary position of authority is gonna take herself way too seriously. The only thing I can do is try ’n’ make her feel important—you know, necessary—like I fear and respect her. Of course, I know I can do it. I’ve been telling people what they wanna hear since I was four years old. It’s as instinctive and automatic as breathing. I can eat shit and suck cock like the best of them.

  “Yeah, well,” her forehead demands. “What did you mean, then?”

  I follow her lead, burying my hands in my own pockets.

  “All I was trying to say,” I tell her, “is that I wanna make this as easy for you as possible. I’ve worked at a couple coffee shops before, and I just remember how annoying it is to have a new person tagging along behind you. So just let me know if I get in your way. But for now, I mean, you tell me what to do and I’ll do it, no problem.”

  Her face lifts up into the light slightly, and for the first time I can see that her eyes are green and striking against her tan skin and cropped dark hair.

  “Okay, good,” she says, her hand reaching up to play absently with the inch-long bar piercing the upper cartilage of her left ear. “Then enough of this touring crap. We gotta get sandwiches prepped for the lunch rush. Let’s go.”

  I follow her behind the counter into the cramped, sweating, noxious kitchen area. She pulls out twenty-five baguettes from the industrial-sized, two-door stainless steel refrigerator. I’m told to split each baguette lengthwise. We go on from there.

  The hours pass so goddamn slow.

  Rafi and Elaina won’t let me make the coffee drinks or do the final preparations on any of the food items, so I’m stuck cleaning every last inch of the kitchen—something that looks like it hasn’t been done in, like, five years. Already I’ve come across more dead roaches and rat shit than I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean, I actually catch myself gagging—and this from a kid who’s eaten out of trash cans to survive.

  The rest of the place is pretty nice, though—open and light, with tall ceilings and concrete floors. It looks like it might’ve been converted from an old barn or something. There’s bad but pleasant student artwork hung on the walls, and a stage is set up in the corner for open-mike nights and live music on the weekends. The shop advertises fair-trade coffee and organic produce. It even has vegan pastries and desserts.

  The customers are mostly college kids—hipsters with tapered jeans and their track bikes all locked up outside. There’s also a middle-age contingency—women with long graying hair and dumpy, sack clothing, men with ponytails and Birkenstocks who look like they might’ve landed in Charleston by mistake on their way to Berkeley or San Francisco—like Columbus finding the Bahamas instead of a route to Asia.

  Of course, every now and then a real-life Southerner walks in, uncomfortably staring at the menu. There was even one paunchy, clean-cut, doughy-looking man with a wealthy, refined Southern accent who slapped the hell out of his little boy ’cause the kid was messing around in line. When I asked Elaina if we could refuse to serve the man, she just made some sort of distorted face and pointed me back toward the kitchen to keep scrubbing behind the oversize refrigerator.

  But eventually eight o’clock finally comes. Elaina goes over some of the closing procedures with me, then has me go around collecting all the trash to take out to the Dumpster. I strain against the stinking black plastic bags, heavy with wet coffee grounds and whatever else, practically having to drag them behind me as I push open the back fire-exit doors. The sun is nearly down, but it’s still hot as a motherfucker, the sweat pooling on my body, spilling out on the baking asphalt. I remember suddenly that Sue Ellen has class tonight till ten thirty, so even when I finish here, I’m going to have to be alone. The trash clatters and crashes into the Dumpster loudly, and I jump, even though I shoulda been expecting the noise. My breath comes all sharp and metallic. If I could get away with screaming right now, I would scream. As it is, I just whisper hoarsely to myself, “Fuck, Nic, fuck. This is your life. This is your fucking life.”

  Ch.20

  Everything is work.

  Either I’m working or I’m exhausted from working or I’m dreading going back to work.

  Today will be my sixth opening shift this week, even though I don’t get paid overtime. Actually, it’s my own damn fault. My boss cornered me about coming in today, and of course I agreed ’cause I don’t know how to say no.

  Especially when I’m sober.

  So the alarm clock beep-beeps at me, and I quickly shut it off to let Sue Ellen sleep in at least a little bit longer. We’ve been living together only about a month now, but between my work and her work and her going to school, we barely see each other at all anymore. Plus, even when she is home, the TV’s always on, so she practically exists more in the world of the Today show, America’s Next Top Model, The Hills, E! Entertainment News, Celebrity Rehab, and Gossip Girl than she does here with me. I swear, it’s like those television people are more real than reality could ever be. And if she’s not watching the lives of others on TV, she’s reading about them on Internet tabloids—Gawker, TMZ, Perez Hilton—clicking from one site to the next. Sometimes she even has both going on at once, the Internet world and the TV world, eyes shifting back and forth. Honestly, at this point, it’s more like we’re living as roommates than anything else.

  But, really, I can’t blame her for wanting to escape. Our existence is suffocating. It grabs hold of my throat with both hands—pressing down slowly—crushing the bones and veins and tendons there. I wish TV could take me away like it does for so many people. I wish I could immerse myself in its simple story lines and unambiguous morality. I wish I could find friendship in these onscreen personalities and indulge my consumer fantasies in the luxury-car ads and blowout electronics sales. I wish so badly I could get lost in it like most people do. I wish that’s all it would take.

  But for me the TV is just bleak and depressing. If anything, having it on all the time makes me even more aware of how hopeless and empty my existence really is. When I was using, I didn’t need to watch TV; I was the star of my own fucking reality show. Every day was like an epic—like a goddamn David Lean movie. Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, or at least the twenty-first-century, fucked-up version of it. Running the streets, breaking into buildings, meeting up with crazy drug dealers, having crazy sex, stealing, running scams for money, living so close to death and life and insanity and greatness. I didn’t have time to watch TV then. But now I’m rotting away in front of it—paralyzed—too scared to live my own damn life. ?
??Cause, really, what life is there to live? Working this dead-end job? Eating takeout with Sue Ellen? Too tired to write. Having to be too goddamn careful of my sobriety to go out and do anything. I mean, shit, man, what the hell kind of life is this? How could this possibly be worth it?

  I always said that I’d rather live a shorter life blissed out on drugs than a long, normal life sober and miserable. I guess at Safe Passage Center I’d started to believe that I could actually live sober and fulfilled, but now I know that’s just more rehab bullshit. Sure, in the safety and little utopian world they create within the treatment center, everything can be all positive and supportive and exciting. But not out here in the real fucking world, where we have to work eight-hour shifts and we can’t relate to anyone—where people my age go out drinking every night and I have to stay in watching Flavor of Love season two.

  It’s just not worth it, man.

  It’s not fucking worth it all.

  It’s not worth it as I make coffee in the kitchen, watching tiny brown roaches scurry off to their cracks and crevices as I turn on the light.

  That’s three trips the goddamn exterminator has made here, and we still can’t get rid of these miracles of evolution.

  I mean, it’s not fucking worth it.

  Not any of it.

  At all.

  I pull on clothes, light a cigarette inside, even though Sue Ellen would flip out at me.

  I drink coffee and put on music, real quiet.

  There’s maybe time for me to listen to one song, I’d say. It’s just about the only connection I have to anything beautiful anymore. It’s the only connection I have with anything that means anything.

  And, of course, at work I can’t ever put on any of my CDs ’cause the two managers somehow established a monopoly on the stereo system, so we end up listening to these soulless, hipster emo bands all day long.

  So I play Marc Bolan, like I said, quiet—the song’s “Life’s a Gas.”

  The alarm next to the bed goes off a second time, and I run in there to shut it off.

  Sue Ellen doesn’t wake up at all.

  I guess ’cause she’s been taking Tylenol PM every night to go to sleep.

  I bend over and kiss her damp, sweating forehead.

  “I’ll call you later,” I whisper.

  She doesn’t respond.

  I go walk off to work.

  The girl opening with me today is someone I haven’t seen around before, I guess maybe ’cause I don’t usually work this shift. She introduces herself as Carmine, and I introduce myself as me—obviously—trying to suss her out as best I can. From what I can tell, I’d say she’s probably a little younger than I am, with a certain quietness about her. A quietness that seems to come from some inner wisdom. And she is beautiful in her quietness. As we set about making the coffee and putting out the baked goods and all that shit, I can’t help but keep studying her, not being too goddamn obvious about it, I hope. I mean, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t notice.

  Her body is extremely thin and sort of pulled and twisted-looking—like maybe she has a kind of scoliosis or something. Her spine is curved like a half moon at the base of her neck, pushing her right shoulder up, creating a fairly large hump there. But her body’s deformity isn’t freakish-looking at all. If anything, it just adds to how fragile and lovely she is, her limbs like spiders’ legs, her eyes large and dark and bored and distrustful, her lips full, pursed, her black hair hanging down long and straight, a lot like Sue Ellen’s.

  When she speaks, her voice comes out all hoarse and raspy, like maybe her throat is being constricted by her condition, even though I guess that’s not how it works, huh? In general she seems reticent to talk to me at first, but I do manage to get a little bit out of her.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m from Broomall, Pennsylvania, but, uh, I’ve been down here for, like, five years now. I mean, I just graduated from school last spring. I’d like to get out of here, for sure—maybe move to LA or New York or someplace where stuff’s actually going on. I’m just trying to save up enough money, that’s all. You know, working here and, uh, making some other money on the side.”

  I decide not to ask her about that second part. Instead, I go on and tell her that I just moved here from LA, and I could definitely see her really loving it out there. While she washes some dishes, I prep the sandwiches, just so I can hang out in the kitchen with her.

  “LA’s actually a pretty cool place,” I say. “I mean, I know everyone disses on it all the time, but, really, compared with other cities, I’d say it’s way less pretentious there. Like, well, I’m from San Francisco, and I lived in New York for a while, but both of those places are so full of phonies trying to claim those cities as their own, you know? Someone could’ve moved to New York, like, a year before, but suddenly they’re calling themselves New Yorkers, sneering at you for not being a local. San Francisco’s the same way. But no one wants to claim LA.”

  The long, serrated bread knife I’m working with slips and slices a big ol’ chunk off the side of my finger.

  “Ah, motherfucker,” I say through my teeth all clenched tight together.

  Deep, purple-red blood drip-drips onto the vegan sandwiches I’ve been making.

  Carmine laughs at me, throwing over a clean dishrag.

  “Here, wrap your hand in that. You’re getting blood everywhere.”

  “Sorry,” I tell her, doing what she said with the cloth. “It’s gross. I’m sorry.”

  She laughs again, saying all sarcastic-like, “What? You gotta problem with blood? You a little squeamish are you? Christ, men are so lame. You should try being a woman. We gotta deal with a lot more blood than that every single month.”

  Narrowing my eyes at her, I speak before I really have time to think better of it. I mean, it just sorta comes out. “Yeah, well, I was an IV crystal meth and heroin addict for about five years, so I’d say I’ve had my share of getting familiar with my own blood.”

  She kinda freezes up at that, and I guess I do, too.

  “Fuck,” I stammer, all quick and awkward. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve just said that. I’m an idiot. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  She stares me down a second longer but then cracks up laughing.

  “Nah,” she says. “I’m just messing with you. I don’t think any less of you, and I definitely won’t tell anyone. Actually, I think it’s kinda cool, really.”

  I tell her it isn’t, but I can tell she’s got this new, misguided respect for me suddenly.

  “Hey, since you told me that,” she whispers, pressing up all close to me, “I’ll tell you a little secret about myself. You know how I said I was saving up money to get out of here? Well, I deal pot and pills, so if you ever need anything, you just ask me.”

  What I’m supposed to say is no. What I’m supposed to tell her is that I’m sober. But what comes out of my mouth is, “Right on, thank you. And, uh, yeah, I won’t tell anyone, either. Don’t worry.”

  And so we go on talking like that for the next couple of hours, until we both get off, doing a pretty good job of ignoring most of the customers. It’s actually Carmine who suggests that I come over. She asks if I wanna go “smoke a bowl.” The way she says it sounds so casual and harmless. A fucking bowl. How dangerous could it possibly be?

  My brain processes the long string of thoughts in a virtual nanosecond. I mean, I think about Safe Passage Center and all the other goddamn rehabs I’ve ever been to. They were all a joke—a waste of time. They were wrong about everything. So when they said I shouldn’t smoke pot, even though my problem had always been with hard drugs, they must’ve been wrong about that, too. I’m not addicted to pot. I’m not even addicted to alcohol. Just ’cause I was addicted to meth and heroin, why the hell would that mean I’m also addicted to pot? It makes no sense. Of course I should be able to smoke pot. Christ, if I’d listened to them, I’d still be at that boot camp place in New Mexico. They obviously have no idea what’s best for me.

  So
what I do is, I light a cigarette and nod my head.

  I follow her through the dirty, sweltering streets—oil, thick and glossy, coats the buildings and parked cars and makeshift basketball hoops made of hollowed-out milk crates nailed to trees on opposite sides of the street. A group of scrawny boys pass the ball back and forth, yelling at the drivers who try to interrupt their game.

  “Man,” I say, laughing at the kids getting all angry and everything. “It really is like another world down here.”

  Carmine seems oblivious to anything goin’ on around us, but she tells me she “knows,” probably just to be polite.

  She leads me down a couple more blocks, and I talk pretty incessantly the whole time, even though my mind is somewhere else entirely. I mean, basically I’m just going over why this is all okay—over and fucking over again.

  ’Cause, see, the thing is, the reason I got addicted in the first place was because the drugs took my terror and depression away. But now I’ve finally learned how to love and value myself. I’ve grown and changed. So there’s no reason why drinking or smoking pot should be a problem. And I’m sure Sue Ellen will agree. I mean, she’s never been an addict, so she doesn’t understand this shit anyway. If I tell her it’s all right, she’ll believe me. She needs me too much to, like, kick me out or anything. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but that’s the truth. Besides, it’ll be good for her. It’ll be good for us both. We’ll finally be able to chill the fuck out a little, you know? Not be so uptight all the time.

  So I follow Carmine into her dark, dank, tiny backroom apartment with these kind of creepy but awesome puppets she designed hanging from the walls and the mantel of the boarded-up fireplace. The dolls are kind of a rip-off of Japanimation monster drawings—with tentacles and too many eyes and long, accentuated bodies that I guess remind me of Carmine’s. I mean, I’m sure that’s the point.