The Comedown Read online

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you whatever you need to know,” Leland Sr. said.

  “Great,” Ulberg said. “I think we can make some progress here, Leland.”

  Leland Sr. drove home, drumming the steering wheel to the tune of “Nobody Wins.” As he drove from west to east, the houses started losing their paint, the stores gaining typos on their awnings. When he got home the boy was asleep in his crib and Melinda was reading a book. When she saw him she smiled and started to ask the question and he said: “Completely unaffordable.”

  “What?”

  “That was…” He looked at his watch. “That was one and a half hours. That cost me fifteen dollars.”

  “But there’s ways—”

  “Not really,” he said, and went into the kitchen, hoisting his pants. He felt tremendously clearheaded and powerful, and with this feeling came—as it often did—the fear that it would be gone soon. He ate an apple from the crisper. Melinda hadn’t stood to follow him.

  “So you’re giving up?” she asked.

  “You know it’s my birthday, Melinda. We should be getting cake.”

  Unfazed, she repeated her question.

  Leland Sr. turned to face her. “Yep.”

  “It sounds like you never even wanted to try it.”

  “It sounds like you’re a psychologist, too.” He smiled at her flirtatiously. She did not smile back. “It’s not going to work financially,” he said. “I’ll fix it another way.”

  “If you don’t see a shrink, the family’s not going to work at all.”

  This statement was designed to send an ordinary man into an emotional tailspin, but it didn’t work on Leland Sr. “I doubt that.”

  “Leland, you’re sick.”

  “Yeah?” He sat down next to her and took another bite of the apple. “How so?”

  “You—” She put her book down to gesture, but her gestures were inexpressive—most of them involved repeatedly describing a globelike shape in midair. “It’s like, you sometimes don’t know what’s real and what’s not. You were on acid most of the time in college, you’ve been high since I’ve known you.”

  “And you?”

  “Not as much as you.”

  “Even just once is enough.”

  “And I think—well, I really think those drugs made you different. You get mad and sad in ways you didn’t before.”

  Leland Sr. looked at her squarely. “I can get mad and sad the way I used to,” he said. “Just say the word.”

  This disarmed her enough to make her laugh. He saw the fault line and pried at it, grabbing her knee. “Is this how I used to be?”

  “No—Leland, that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What are you talking about?” He began massaging up her thigh. She tried to stop him. Leland Jr. coughed loudly from his crib.

  “He has the croup,” she said.

  “What were you talking about?”

  “You getting better.” But she was smiling now; he’d won. “I just think that maybe if you talked to these doctors they could help you.”

  Leland Sr. now had his hand on her inner thigh. “Plenty of hippies did a lot more drugs than I did.”

  “Well, yeah, but I care about you doing them, not the hippies. There was an article about Timothy Leary in Time last week.” She looked at him and her face seemed softer, smaller, like the face of a child seeking approval. “We promised no more of that, right? You know, we promised when I got rid of all the grass when Leland Jr. was born.”

  She was fond of saying this. It made them better parents, in her ultrahumble opinion. And of course it was a self-soothing lie: he could still smell the grass coming from her dresser drawer. He could smell it on her as she cooked dinner. “But the kid got high, whether you meant him to or not,” he reminded her.

  Melinda had given in to Leland Sr.’s hand. She had uncrossed her legs. He was nearly up to her crotch.

  The boy woke up and began screaming. Leland Sr. withdrew his hand, slumped back in his captain’s chair, and ate his apple, watching Melinda hurry into Leland Jr.’s room. She returned with the boy in her arms. He was red in the cheeks and his nose was mottled with dried snot. She held him on her hip.

  “You’re getting a little big for your crib, aren’t you, baby?” she asked.

  Leland Jr. shook his head, still screaming. He was already two years old but he barely talked. She pointed to Leland Sr. “You see Daddy? Wanna say hi to Daddy?”

  Leland Jr. shook his head again, slowed the waterworks to a trickle, and began to hiccup. He looked at Leland Sr., who waved.

  “Do you wanna go to Daddy?”

  Leland Jr. stuck his fingers in his mouth and hugged his mother around the neck. Leland Sr. looked at them both. The boy had instantly undone all his work.

  “You can’t just talk your way out of this,” she said, running her hand over the back of Leland Jr.’s head. “You don’t see yourself when you get this way, but I do. And look, you’ve already scared Leland Jr.”

  “I haven’t scared him. He doesn’t remember anything.”

  “He remembers you throwing plates.” This had been her trump card for the past three months, the plates incident.

  “One plate.”

  “It scared him.”

  Leland Sr. shook his head. “What’s for dinner?”

  But his question was useless. She’d gotten combative again and could not be distracted. “Don’t try to change the subject! You have to go to the shrink, Leland.”

  “Do I have to bankrupt the family, too? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “We can afford it.”

  The boy was screaming again.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Leland Sr. said. He went into the kitchen. She followed him this time, the boy a human shield on her hip. “What’s for dinner?” he repeated.

  She was silent. He opened the fridge in search of deli meat they didn’t appear to have. Predictably, she spoke first.

  “You are going to do this,” she said.

  He stopped searching but didn’t face her. This would give her the impression that he was building to a pique, but really he felt nothing. “This is just another hippie fad,” he said. “Just because you see it in the movies doesn’t mean it’s going to work.”

  “If you don’t do this, you won’t be setting any kind of an example for your son.”

  He slammed the fridge closed and turned to face her. “You want my son”—he used his entire hand, palm up, to gesture to the boy—“to grow up to be the kind of guy who has to go talk to some fat old faggot about his problems because he can’t handle them himself?” He’d matched his son’s decibel level and then quickly exceeded it. “You told me to try it, I tried it, it didn’t work. Enough!”

  “You have to work at it, not just try!”

  “You’re the fucking expert! You win!” Leland Sr. went past her, out of the kitchen. He saw his coat on the captain’s chair and grabbed it. Leland Jr. was now coughing through his screams.

  “You’re upsetting him,” she said.

  He put his coat on. He knew it wouldn’t do him any good to get angrier. She’d started to cry a little and her grip on the boy had gone slack; she had to walk over to the couch and set him down. The boy got stiff and angry without his mother to claw onto and he sat there shivering, snot running down his upper lip.

  Leland Sr. pointed his car in the direction of work: Cleveland Scrap, down by the stockyards. It was his birthday after all. If no one was going to do anything nice for him, he’d do something nice for himself. The shop was closed for the night but maybe guys would still be hanging around playing poker. They were a small outfit, run by Mickey, a wide-faced Czech guy whom Leland Sr. had gone to school with since the fourth grade. Mickey dropped out of school after the ninth grade and got a job at Republic Steel, then got fired from that for stealing machine parts and did something—Leland Sr. couldn’t remember what—that led to him spending a year in juvie. When he got out of there, he flipped enough ca
rs to open his own scrap shop in the stockyards and got all his friends jobs. The summer after Leland Sr. graduated college, he gave Mickey a call and asked for one.

  “College wants a job at my scrap shop!” Mickey’s voice was high-pitched and cigarette-rough.

  “I just want a job,” Leland Sr. said.

  “Why don’t you come down to my office for an interview, College?”

  Coming down to Mickey’s “office” meant burning a fat jay on the bank of the Cuyahoga right next to Republic Steel. It was the part of Leland’s life before he discovered medicine when everything felt slow and messy. Melinda was still upset about those kids getting shot on campus. She was at home pregnant with swollen feet, probably studying for her real estate exam. He was already trying to think of ways to leave her that wouldn’t hurt her feelings, but he still loved her and would probably feel bad if he didn’t see their child being born.

  If only he could’ve beamed into the future and seen himself still working at that shop three fucking years later. Leland Sr. Sr. and Sarah had expected him to do something useful with the philosophy degree, become a lawyer and spend at least three years “getting established” before he got his wife pregnant. But he hadn’t done either and now they barely ever spoke to him. Sometimes they sent money, sometimes they sent holiday greeting cards, occasionally Sarah called him and asked him if he had any plans to stop renting and buy property.

  After one of these horrible phone calls, he’d wandered into the back room at Scrap, where Mickey and all his juvie friends were playing cards after clocking out. He had seen Mickey pressing his face close to the table with a tiny chunk of straw in his nose. He had watched Mickey slap his cheeks and laugh and pound his chest, pass the straw to the guy sitting next to him. Leland Sr. sat down—eventually it was his turn. He’d only done mushrooms, acid, and grass before. He bent down close to the table and got halfway through the line, then stopped. Mickey called him “college pussy,” so he finished it. How could he explain to his mother the way he felt after that, like his brain worked as it had always been intended to work? How could he describe the way the room looked, the way his thoughts moved, the big, bright faces of all Mickey’s juvie friends shouting about how smart and funny he was? She’d never understand. Instead he told her that he’d never buy property and she should get used to the way his generation was living.

  Halfway to the shop he remembered Mickey was out of town until Thursday and so redirected toward Ohio City, toward his friend Reggie. When he thought of people like Reggie, people who’d realized about the healing power of medicine and had resolved to make their livings outside of conventional capitalism, he got excited. He saw hope for the future—his future. They shared a birthday, V-day babies both, basically twins. Except Reggie didn’t have a father who’d cried and chain-smoked Turkish cigars in the hospital waiting room, a father who got so emotional that the only name he could think to give his newborn son was his own. Leland Sr. imagined Reggie’s father as Reggie but meatier, a John Wayne type who never took no for an answer. As was the case with Leland Sr., Reggie’s draft number hadn’t gotten called, though Leland Sr. guessed he probably would’ve burned his card if it had been. He hung out with Reggie on the curb whenever he could. Sometimes he talked to people for him, got them to cough up more money when Reggie did his count at the end of the day and found he was running short. Reggie even let him come back in the massage parlor where he worked, especially if it was winter—Leland Sr. never had a good coat because the cold didn’t bother him, but Reggie would always tell him to come in so he didn’t freeze his ass off and scare away customers. Then Reggie would go to the basement and Leland Sr. would get to sit on the velvet couch in the front room surrounded by girls who wore aprons over their pasties and bikini bottoms and flitted around him like exotic birds. They even smelled beautiful: peach and grapefruit and honeysuckle perfume, occasionally a hint of well-washed bare skin. There was one named Meesha who flirted with him every time he was there. Once she even went to the bathroom with him and took her apron off free of charge. She said she was doing it because she felt bad for him, and when he asked her why she only shrugged and kissed him on the cheek. Maybe special people who understood him could read the truth on his face: the life he’d made before medicine was inferior to the life he’d made after medicine, and he was trying to loose the chains of the former so he could live in the latter. He thanked Meesha and told her she wouldn’t have to feel bad for him much longer.

  He parked four blocks from Reggie’s usual spot, paid the meter, and started walking. He hadn’t seen Reggie in almost three weeks and he’d begun to worry. He’d been buying from a gray-skinned guy in the massage parlor who called himself Lev; whenever Leland Sr. asked about Reggie, Lev just shook his head. It was getting cold already—every year it seemed to happen earlier, or else he was just feeling it earlier. It was almost discouraging to think about how much he’d changed and how little the world around him had, how slow everything moved in comparison to his brain. He felt bad for everyone who lacked his supersensing powers, and he felt bad for Reggie because his coworkers didn’t care about him. In his dream world, there’d be a government agency that dispensed medicine in glass bottles like the milkman’s. Every American would have the option of turning on for free; if they didn’t want to, they could just pass it along to their neighbor. That was the problem with Melinda—she’d turned on and turned off, left behind what could’ve been a beautiful life. She’d never struck him as the kind of girl who wanted two kids and a two-car garage, but people changed. Especially women.

  By the time he got to Reggie’s spot, his thoughts were running too fast for him to keep up, and there was what felt like dirty water pooling in his forehead. He never realized how badly he needed to re-up until it was right on top of him. He walked up and down the street: Reggie wasn’t there. He called Reggie’s name and an old woman across the street yelled at him to keep it down, it was a weeknight.

  “I’m looking for my friend, ma’am!” Leland Sr. shouted back. “I haven’t seen him in three weeks! Wouldn’t you be worried about a very dear friend of yours if you hadn’t seen him in three weeks?”

  He was sputtering by the end of the sentence, spitting into the street. The woman’s eyes got wide and she turned and pushed her little cart of knickknacks fast away from him. Reggie was nowhere, but the kids who bought from him were skulking around in front of the Cash and Carry on the corner.

  “You seen Reggie?” Leland Sr. asked one of them, a pale blond girl named Tina or Teresa with sticky-looking bangs. She turned away from her boyfriend, a shade darker than Reggie with a sharp chin, and spit on the ground in front of Leland Sr.

  “Yeah, I seen him,” she said.

  “When?”

  “The fuck you mean when?” she asked, and her boyfriend grabbed her hand and laughed. Then her eyes got big. “Oh, damn,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I know what’s happening here. He’s avoiding you.”

  Leland Sr. laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Believe what you want to believe.”

  “No, seriously, man,” her boyfriend chimed in. “You annoy the shit outta him. He told me.”

  The girl covered her mouth with her hands. “You’re not getting high anymore, Big L?”

  Leland Sr. could feel the dirty pool getting bigger. “Don’t call me that,” he said.

  “What? ‘Big L’?” The girl cackled, the sound like a knife to his inner ear.

  He turned around and walked off. If they couldn’t behave like actual human beings, he didn’t owe them his time. Actually, all bad behavior was just human behavior—truly good behavior would have to be superhuman, the kind you could only achieve on medicine. Instead of living out a shitty nightmare of earthly dependence, begging for your weekly paycheck and your groceries and your whiny family and your messy house, you could be a supersenser like Leland Sr. You could be the kind of person who saw all the system’s hypocrisies and rejected them. He saw, for instance, tha
t humans only felt they needed to be governed because they told themselves so—everyone was perfectly capable of rational self-governance. Look at all those tribal cultures in Papua New Guinea: they didn’t need a president telling them what and what not to eat, whom and whom not to fuck. People only believed in families because they felt they had to. What was wrong with letting a child make decisions for himself—why have a mother and father hovering over him constantly? Why commit yourself to only one woman for the rest of your life? Why go to college and study books and take tests just to win a paper-pushing job to support that woman and her children? A job where you’d probably end up writing some forms or deposing some evidence or stitching up some skin so the world could keep on turning all average and unquestioning and calm like it had before. A job where you’d do your best to make it more difficult for people to live outside the normalcy coffin—where you and your clients would keep on arming police officers and paying taxes and electing bureaucrats who didn’t give a fuck about your lives but made it sound like they did. Only he and the few others like him could see above the fray.

  The light was off in the massage parlor and the door was locked. He tried the door on the side, then the one in the back. All locked. This was a first. He went back around to the front and knocked on the window.

  “Lev!” he shouted. He looked at his dark reflection in the glass, the golden halo of the streetlamp behind him. “Lev!” he shouted again. A car passed behind him, honking its horn as it crawled away. Did he know that guy? He was starting to feel very bad. He banged on the door, tapped on the window. He thought about smashing it but thought better: the last thing he needed was some pig telling him he wasn’t following the order of the law.

  “You’ve been through this,” he whispered to himself. “You remember last Easter?” Holy fucking God did he remember last Easter. Melinda insisted on dragging him and the boy to church and he’d sat there thinking he had about two hours of sermons to endure but he’d really had four. Goyim loved their sitting and chanting and tithing. He hadn’t had any medicine since early the night before. By the time he started feeling it, he’d already gone outside three times for a cigarette. By noon his skin was crawling and his thoughts were turning to suicide: jumping from the balcony, sharpening the cross on the pulpit and falling on it, breaking the stained glass and slitting his wrists with the shards. A faraway part of his brain knew these thoughts would disappear once he got his hands on his medicine, but all the closer-up parts of his brain felt them as incredibly real. He was sweating and digging his fingernails into his kneecaps. Melinda gave him a tight-eyebrowed look. When they got home, it felt as if there were pebbles under his skin. He went to the box he kept under the boy’s crib (formerly at the back of his sock drawer, in his glove compartment, on the highest shelf in the closet). He was praying he’d still have at least a dub’s worth left, but he had nothing. He’d had to drive all the way to Ohio City, biting his nails bloody, praying that this would never happen to him again. He’d barely made it to Reggie’s spot, his sight flickering on and off. Reggie let him re-dose right there, less than three feet away, whispering the whole time that Leland Sr. was an idiot for not planning ahead and he should feel really fucking lucky Reggie was a kind person.