The Comedown Read online

  Reggie should’ve run when he had the chance. Tasha would’ve said fuck the money. His body hurt now so much he couldn’t move. His ears were buzzing, making everything Sunny was saying a faraway hum. Like someone had hit a gong hard and then just let it ring and ring and ring. He remembered Cookie played drums in junior high. He got so good that they made him part of a program where he went on a bus to Shaker Heights to play in a youth orchestra, and one time Reggie went to see his show at the high school there. Cookie had done the same dumbass face he always did whenever he saw Reggie—tongue stuck out, eyes crossed—and Reggie was laughing so hard, because instead of doing it at the corner shop or the gas station, he was doing it while wearing a suit on a stage full of white and Asian kids. The conductor said, “We’ll be playing Prokofiev’s concerto in something,” and Reggie watched Cookie bang on the drum at the back of the stage, fast and loud and with perfect rhythm.

  The last time he saw Cookie was four years ago. He had been trying to leave the woman he had his first kid with, a girl he kept calling “bossy” but who Reggie thought was calm as a swan. They were smoking at Reggie’s place, trying to think of how to make more money. Reggie had just been fired by the postal service and Cookie was posted up on the corner. “Why don’t you get back in it?” Cookie asked, and Reggie actually thought about it, the shit in his head making everything foggy. “Ay, it’ll be like school days,” Cookie said, his little cherub face scrunched up and laughing. “It’s like being sixteen again.” The last thing Reggie wanted to be was sixteen again: making his father’s rent, ripping up his mother’s postcards from the crazy house. But who else was going to pay him? He was getting rejected everywhere he applied. He was in love with a girl and he needed to get paid.

  He had officially been fired from the postal service for stealing from mailboxes, which he had never done. That was back when he was determined to “fly straight” and “have a career.” His route had taken him through Cleveland Heights, and every day he had to walk past the house of this ancient white woman who had a mouth like a toenail clipping all screwed up on the side of her face. Every time he pulled up into that neighborhood she was at her door staring him down, and once she even shouted, “I know why you’re here and I can let the police know, too!” He tried to keep his head down, only speak if spoken to. But one day in that neighborhood, in a house several streets over, he noticed a girl standing in a second-floor window, looking out into the sky. She had been playing with her necklace, her one arm crossed over her stomach. He’d seen girls in Hough who looked a little like her, but none of them stood the way she stood, made that serene face she was making. She was more beautiful than all of them put together.

  He parked and got out of his truck to deliver her mail, which he really didn’t need to do because he could’ve just reached through the truck’s window, but he wanted to stand on her driveway and get her attention. He saw she’d seen him and was leaning forward to take him in, both hands on the windowsill, her face gentle and curious. He had waved up at her, chin to dumbass chest Cookie-style because he didn’t know what else to do. She had laughed silently and waved back. She wore a sweater that showed her shoulders and a pearl necklace he’d later find out was made of something called Bakelite.

  Every day after that he got out of his truck to see her. He did this even though she wasn’t always there. Eventually she showed up every day, waving like she’d been expecting him. Sometimes she’d point to her watch and shake her head, like Look how late you are. He’d point to his wrist and shrug: I don’t have a watch. She’d laugh. When she laughed, she hugged her shoulders and turned a little from side to side. She was small, he could tell.

  One day, she had walked outside and down the driveway. She looked at her feet even though he knew she knew he was watching her. She put her hands on the mailbox and smiled up at him. Then she stuck her hand out for the mail.

  “I want to bring it up to the house personally,” she said. Her first words to him.

  “Who’s living in that house with you?” he asked.

  “My daddy,” she said. “My momma. And my sister.”

  “Full house.”

  “Yeah.”

  They looked at each other a little longer, smiling.

  “You go to school?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Axel Renfroe College. It’s one of the Black Ivies.”

  He nodded like he knew it, but he didn’t. He could tell she saw right through him.

  “My daddy teaches there,” she said. “He’s a professor of history.”

  “Would your daddy mind if I called you?”

  She lost her smile for a second, and he waited.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. He didn’t even know her name and she had left him standing at the foot of her beautiful driveway. He was about to drag himself back into the truck when she emerged from the house, skip-running down the driveway, a piece of paper in her hand. Breathless, she gave it to him. There was a phone number, and above it her name and a message: Natasha Harrison. Below the phone number was written: Call after 7:00 p.m.! Now, whenever she told the story, she was always saying she’d written something different. The message in that note was one of the few things they could never agree on.

  He got fired the morning after that, the patchouli-smelling supervisor who’d hired him saying, “We should’ve known better than to take a risk on you, Reginald.” That night he called the number at seven o’clock exactly.

  Reggie was thinking about all of that while Sunny reached down to remove the Beretta and the .45 from his pockets. His eyes were up on the ceiling and his knee was oozing and a tooth had come loose from his jaw. Damn, I should’ve just said no when Shondor asked me did I wanna do him a big favor for big money. Sunny’s a fucking idiot if he ever thought he was family. I’m a fucking idiot for ever thinking I was family. Then he was thinking of his real family, thinking of Caleb and Aaron in their matching cribs with the duckie bunting Tasha had picked out, thinking of Cookie and his goofy-looking daughter with Cookie’s same busted teeth, thinking of his dead father and probably dead mother. Good fucking Christ he’d felt so small so many times in his life. Why, from the minute he was born, did so many people want him dead? What was so wrong with his being alive?

  He wished things had gone differently. Out of his bloody mouth he whispered the words, “I wish things coulda been different.” And then Sunny fired the .45 at his head.

  LELAND BLOOM-MITTWOCH SR.

  (1945–1999)

  May 8, 1973

  Cleveland

  His wife thought he was a badly disturbed man, so he had agreed to sit in a room with someone he hated and talk about his earliest memory. And now here he was. The memory came from the year 1949 and found him standing in the kitchen behind his mother, listening to her tenderize a chicken breast with a stainless steel mallet. This noise was the loudest he’d ever heard associated with his mother, and the fact that he could only see her back—the carefully pressed Peter Pan collar of her dress, the knot of her apron, the shine of her shaved calves muted by panty hose—made him upset. In front of her like blank-faced cronies stood two refrigerators: one for meat and pareve and a shorter one for milk. He wasn’t tall enough to see her arm raising and lowering the mallet: the sound could just as easily have been the result of something that was happening to her as something she was making happen.

  Leland Sr.’s therapist was named Leonard Ulberg. He smelled like salmon and wore, for his extreme farsightedness, the kind of thick-framed black glasses that had gone out of style thirteen years ago. When Leland Sr. told him the memory, Ulberg leaned forward and said: “What does it feel like to remember?”

  “It doesn’t feel any way,” Leland Sr. said. “It feels like a thought.”

  “What kind of thought, Leland?”

  “About how maybe it was happening to her.” He realized he probably shouldn’t have told Ulberg this memory to begin with.

  Ulberg folded his hands in his lap. “This was the first house you e
ver lived in, right? What was it like being in the kitchen of this house?”

  It wasn’t a house, it was an apartment, but Leland Sr. didn’t see the point in correcting him. He shifted in his seat. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you like being there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Why the hell does anyone like being in his kitchen? Why was he being subjected to this, and on his birthday?

  “I don’t know,” Leland Sr. said, and stared neutrally back at Ulberg.

  The apartment had been in Cleveland Heights. They had moved there because his mother, Sarah, knew one other Sachsen-Anhalt family who lived in the area. The family’s name was Brecht and every Friday and Saturday they went to temple at the Kinsman Jewish Center, which used to be mostly German-Hungarian and very frummie but had since opened its doors to any dedicated kosher-keeping Jews who’d escaped their hometown pogroms. The Brechts had two kids, Amos and Ruth, and they didn’t get along that well with Leland Sr. and Leland Sr. didn’t get along that well with them.

  Cleveland Heights may have been called the Heights, but it wasn’t, and just one of the ways you could tell was by the quality of the grocery store. The place was small and dirty and had a flickering light in the meat aisle. Leland Sr.’s mother spoke with irritation about the old Negro man who was always trying to fix that light, carrying on about how the manager must’ve hired him out of charity because the Negro man always did things too slow and bungled the job. She was happy when the manager fired him and hired a Jewish veteran with a missing eye who fixed the light the day he started. The grocery store made Leland Sr. depressed, even as a little kid. His mother always bought gray-looking meat just because it was blessed by a rabbi. The little circles of salami he couldn’t have looked so tender and delicious.

  “What were you thinking about just then?” Ulberg asked.

  He’d been thinking about food he couldn’t have as a child. A polyp of ill will exploded in his brain. “Well, I feel better!” he barked.

  Ulberg laughed his Austrian gallows-laughter. “If only it were that easy, huh?”

  Leland Sr. laughed back harshly. “No. No, it’s not.” He half rose. “But would you mind if I just use the restroom quickly?”

  Ulberg gave him a neutral look. “Go out my office, take two lefts—it’s at the end of the hall.”

  Leland Sr. did as he was told. His brain was itchy and hot and he regretted neglecting it for so long. What he was thinking about now was the Kinsman Jewish Center and the fat face of Amos Brecht as he shoved Leland Sr. down the stairs one Shabbat. Leland Sr. couldn’t have been older than seven. He’d been crying and bleeding from the knee. Sarah had run to him without saying anything to Amos, who stood at the top of the stairs, picking his nose. It was Mr. and Mrs. Brecht’s place to punish him. Leland Sr. couldn’t remember if they had. He couldn’t remember what had happened to Amos, either. He’d probably gone off to law or med school and then returned to the Heights to practice. The Brechts were known for driving Amos and Ruth hard, even though they were both stupid kids.

  Leland Sr. entered a stall in the bathroom. He removed a small, tightly wound, and almost empty baggie of medicine from his coat and then removed his keys from his pocket. He opened the baggie and dipped his house key in and brought the ridged end up to his right nostril to do a little bump. He did another one at his left. As he was doing this, the door opened and Leland Sr. could see the loafers and ankles of a pair of Farah slacks. He stopped midsniff. He should’ve been panicking, but he was thinking instead about the little roll of skin between the bottom of Amos Brecht’s head and the top of his neck. Leland Sr. needed at least four bumps for this to work and didn’t really care what the loafers and slacks thought of him. He flushed the toilet once. Then he got down on his knees and made sounds like he was dry heaving. He collected spit in his mouth and let it drop into the bowl. He made sure to gag on the spit a little before releasing it. If he could’ve produced a wet fart, he would’ve. The loafers and slacks paused by the sink; there was the sound of running water. Leland Sr. flushed the toilet again and then again. The loafers and slacks left, not doing what they had presumably come to do. Leland Sr. stood up and arranged things for his third bump. He sniffed it up, right nostril, and said under his breath: “Fucking Brecht.” Then he did his fourth, left nostril, and sucked on the tip of the key. The key wasn’t enough, so he broke a little rock in the baggie with his pinkie and ran it over his gums. He left the stall and looked at himself in the mirror. He picked at his nostrils. He doused his face with hot water until it was pink. Then he dried it with a paper towel. He tilted his head backward, using the angle to get a view up his nose. He sniffed once more and left the bathroom.

  When he returned, Ulberg said: “You were in there a while.”

  “Well, yeah. I was thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  Leland Sr. could answer this one truthfully. “Amos Brecht.”

  “Who’s Amos Brecht?”

  “He was the son of my parents’ friends.”

  “Was he your friend?”

  “No. We went to temple together.”

  Ulberg nodded, considering this. “Why wasn’t he your friend?”

  “I dunno. He shoved me.”

  “He shoved you.”

  “Yep.”

  “How did you react?”

  “I cried.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  This wasn’t true. Leland Sr. had held the grudge until Purim 1954. This was four years before Kinsman was sold off and became the Warrensville Center Synagogue, when the Purim celebration had still been in a shabby little banquet room where the adults got drunk while the kids acted out the story of Esther and Mordecai on a thin “stage” that was just two mess-hall tables flush against each other. Leland Sr. was playing Haman. Ruth, thin-haired and sow-looking, was playing one of Esther’s attendants. Amos had gotten the role of King Ahasuerus: all he had to do was pretend he couldn’t fall asleep, which wasn’t a problem Leland Sr. guessed Amos ever had. Leland Sr. liked wearing the ugly Haman mask and hearing the noise of the graggers whenever his name was announced. He played such a convincing Haman that the rabbi pulled him aside and promised him the role again next year.

  After the rabbi complimented him, Leland Sr. went outside in his Haman mask to where the other kids were playing. They were all wearing their coats and kicking the dirty snow; some had started a game of chasing one another with sticks. Amos and Ruth were playing together, still in their costumes under their coats. They were climbing the concrete steps to the back door and then taking turns jumping from them, seeing who could jump the farthest. Inside, the adults had gotten loud and were making dinner noises. Leland Sr. went up to Amos and tore his paper crown from his head.

  “Hey!” Amos warbled.

  Leland Sr. stamped the crown into the snow. Ruth backed away, sucking nervously on her finger.

  “I’m Haman!” Leland Sr. shouted. He climbed to the top stair. “I’m Haman!” he shouted again. He’d gotten the other kids’ attention by now. It was strange to say “Haman” and not hear graggers and booing.

  “You messed up my crown,” Amos said.

  Leland Sr. began delivering his lines: “I’m Haman and I order an execution of all the Jews in Persia!” Then he jumped off the stairs and onto Amos, who was too stunned to move, and they fell down together. The other boys gathered in a circle around them; a few of the girls ran away and one started crying. Amos tried as best he could to block his face, but he was horrible at it. Leland Sr. was moving too fast for him to scream or cry. He held Amos’s arms back and kneeled on his biceps. Then he punched Amos’s face a few times, once hard enough to break his nose. Then he slapped him. The girls who hadn’t run away were screaming and the boys were chanting. After some more slaps, Leland Sr. became dimly aware that there were adults outside, and that Amos had succeeded in letting out a huge sob.

  Leland Sr. was pulled
off Amos and then Leland Sr. Sr. was holding him. Mrs. Brecht helped Amos off the ground and was holding him in her arms. Leland Sr. kept on kicking.

  Leland Sr. Sr. yanked the Haman mask from Leland Sr.’s face and threw it down. He kneeled in front of Leland Sr., who was crying by now: “No son with my name should ever behave like that.”

  Sarah and Leland Sr. Sr. had, after the incident, worked tirelessly to win back the trust of the congregation. Sarah quickly sent the remainder of their hamantaschen to the Brechts. Leland Sr. Sr. allowed the rabbi to separate Leland Sr.’s desk from the other children’s during Hebrew school. The Brechts pretended to understand but grew distant. Leland Sr. was stripped of his role as Haman (it went to a skinny kid named Louis), reduced to wagging a gragger with the adults until he became a bar mitzvah.

  Ulberg’s office was now noticeably brighter.

  “Do you know why you were referred to me?” he asked Leland Sr.

  Leland Sr. laughed. “By my wife.”

  “We both know who asked you to come to me, but why did she do it?”

  Leland Sr. shrugged.

  “I don’t think she knows why herself,” Ulberg said. “But can I hazard a guess?” He didn’t wait for Leland Sr.’s response. “Because you seem to have a problem with drugs. And you’re at what we call the ‘high bottom’ right now. You haven’t lost your job, you haven’t lost your wife and son, you seem to be doing relatively okay financially. But maybe you know you can’t stay at the high bottom forever. Am I right?”

  Leland Sr. focused very closely on Ulberg’s face, which was looking plush and wattley in the same way Amos’s had. Leland shook his head and smiled pleasantly.

  “I can’t stop you doing what you’re doing, Leland. That’s your choice. But I can help you figure out why you’re doing it. For this to work, you’ll have to help me out a little, too. You’ll have to tell me some things about your life.”