The Best of Me(75)

Nothing in this guy’s life sounded normal to me. Take food: He could recall his mother rolling joints on the kitchen counter, but he couldn’t remember her cooking a single meal, not even on holidays. For dinner they’d eat take-out hamburgers or pizzas, sometimes a sandwich slapped together over the sink. Johnny didn’t cook either. Neither did his father or future stepmother. I asked what was in their refrigerator, and he said, “Ketchup, beer, mixers—what else?” He had no problem referring to himself as an alcoholic. “It’s just a fact,” he said. “I have blue eyes and black hair too. Big deal.”

“Here’s a clean one,” the black man said. “A fried-egg sandwich walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender looks him up and down, then goes, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve food here.’”

“Oh, that’s old,” one of his fellow drunks said. “Not only that, but it’s supposed to be a hamburger, not a fried-egg sandwich.”

“It’s supposed to be food, is what it’s supposed to be,” the black man told him. “As to what that food is, I’ll make it whatever the hell I want to.”

“Amen,” Johnny said, and the black man gave him a thumbs-up.

His next joke went over much better. “What did the leper say to the prostitute? ‘Keep the tip.’”

I pictured what looked like a mushroom cap resting in the palm of an outstretched hand. Then I covered my mouth and laughed so hard that beer trickled out of my nose. I was just mopping it up when the last call was announced, and everyone raced to the counter to stock up. Some of the drinkers would be at it until morning when the bar reopened, while others would find their assigned seats and sleep for a while before returning.

As for Johnny, he had a fifth of Smirnoff in his suitcase. I had two Valiums in mine, and, because of my ugly past history with sedatives, the decision to share them came easily. An hour later, it was agreed that we needed to smoke some pot. Each of us was holding, so the only question was where to smoke it—and how to get there from the bar. Since taking the Valium, drinking six beers, and following them with straight vodka, walking had become a problem for me. I don’t know what it took to bring down Johnny, but he wasn’t even close yet. That’s what comes with years of socking it away—you should be unconscious, but instead you’re up, and full of bright ideas. “I think I’ve got a place we can go to,” he said.



I’m not sure why he chose the women’s lounge rather than the men’s. Perhaps it was closer or maybe there was no men’s lounge. One way or the other, even now, all these many years later, it shames me to think of it. The idea of holing up in a bathroom, of hogging the whole thing just so that you can hang out with someone who will never, under any circumstances, return your interest, makes me cringe. Especially given that this—the “dressing room,” it was called—was Amtrak’s one meager attempt to recapture some glamour. It amounted to a small chamber with a window—a space not much bigger than a closet. There was an area to sit while brushing your hair or applying makeup, and a mirror to look into while you did it. A second, inner door led to a sink and toilet, but we kept that shut and installed ourselves on the carpeted floor.

Johnny had brought our plastic cups from the bar, and after settling in, he poured us each a drink. I felt boneless, as if I’d been filleted; yet still I managed to load the pipe and hold my lighter to the bowl. Looking up through the window, I could see the moon, which struck me, in my half-conscious state, as flat and unnaturally bright, a sort of glowing Pringle.

“Do you think we can turn that overhead light off?” I asked.

“No problem, Chief.”

It was he who brought up the subject of sex. One moment I was asking if his mom gave him a discount on his drugs, and the next thing I knew he was telling me about this woman he’d recently slept with. “A fatty,” he called her. “A bloodsucker.” Johnny also told me that the older he got, the harder it was to get it up. “I’ll be totally into it and then it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ You know?”

“Oh, definitely,” I said.

He poured more vodka into his plastic cup and swirled it around, as if it were a fine cognac that needed to breathe. “You get into a lot of fights?” he asked.

“Arguments?”

“No,” he said. “I mean with your fists. You ever punch people?”

I relit the pipe and thought of the dustup my former boyfriend and I had had before I left. It was the first time since the fifth grade that I’d hit someone not directly related to me, and it left me feeling like a Grade A moron. This had a lot to do with my punch, which was actually more of a slap. To make it worse, I’d then slipped on the icy sidewalk and fallen into a bank of soft gray snow.



There was no need to answer Johnny’s fistfight question. The subject had been raised for his benefit rather than mine, an excuse to bemoan the circumference of his biceps. Back when he was boxing, the one on the right had measured seventeen and a half inches. “Now it’s less than fourteen,” he told me. “I’m shrinking before my very fucking eyes.”

“Well, can’t you fatten it back up somehow?” I asked. “You’re young. I mean, just how hard can it be to gain weight?”

“The problem isn’t gaining weight, it’s gaining it in the right place,” Johnny said. “Two six-packs a day might swell my stomach, but it’s not doing shit for my arms.”