ADAM

 

The Brooklyn Bridge

 

Rho likes to think he saved me that night.

That he kept the Brooklyn Bridge from being my abysmal, eternal grave. I’d like to think that he’s right, but sometimes I wonder. Was it worth it? Was my life worth all the pain and misery that followed me to Rho’s Brooklyn?

I was hopped up on a hundred and fifty pills, I couldn’t see straight when I walked up to that bridge. I remember I had a half-empty bottle of gin that I used to wash down the pills. The water under the bridge looked strangely enticing. For a mortuary, it was oddly breathtaking. I felt in tune with all the beings lying underneath the water, creatures no different than me, some of them human, lost on their way to heaven, who decided to end it all one day for reasons no one else could comprehend. It pained my heart to think I was in that place. The pills were already down my throat, there was no turning back. Even if I didn’t jump, I would die. It was dark inside the grave, but it was darker in solitary desolation.

When you realize that you don’t matter, the world becomes inconsequential and claustrophobic. You feel trapped inside your body, and your mind. Nothing can take you out of that desperation, unless they take the brunt of your loneliness and make it their own.

You don’t want to matter to a bunch of strangers, you want to matter to people who will be with you the next day. Friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, mothers, and fathers… I had no one. No one ever came to love me the way I wanted to be loved, desperately and with an insane hunger. No one had touched my heart, no one had showed me passion and what love was and I felt lost. Life wasn’t going to get easier if I tried to stick around one more day, it would just get more torturous. If you don’t live for anyone, are you even living? I don’t know about others, but I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t keep going from one fucked up apartment to another, from one dream to another, from one penniless night in absolute misery to another.

I was drained from the effort of being alive.

I tossed the empty bottle in the river, and felt it mocking me. You little shit. Just who do you think you are to want to live within me? You’re not special. You’re not deserving. You’re not even that sad. What makes you think you can join all those greats living on my bed? Go home. And if you don’t have a home, go sleep on a park bench like the other outcasts. Your army of rejects. Leave me the fuck alone.

I don’t know why the water was being mean to me, but it made sense. Everything it said was true. That was the trouble with my life. Everyone wanted to kick me out. Everyone wanted to be rid of me. So, I started wanting to be rid of myself.

The wind was making my shirt blow, and the torn front buttons flapped in the air when I climbed the ledge. My chest was bruised, raw from the beating. Their faces flashed in front of my eyes in an unstoppable, never-ending loop. I wish I could control it. But a bunch of strangers pushing and shoving you around, and coming together to annhilate you, there’s something dehumanizing and shockingly brutal about the whole experience. It’s like sitting aside to watch while humanity goes down the crapper. My head hit the ground several times and one time, I passed out, but they didn’t even notice. It was like they were getting off on it. My broken sense of self-worth was entertainment to them. My shattered soul was their prize, and my injuries were reasons for them to revel. I had never encountered such frightening cruelty before and it terrified me.

When I coughed I felt the agony in my chest, and the sound of a heavy bat colliding into my ribcage came rushing back. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but occasionally I heard the familiar sounds of engines rushing past me, and they all chose to ignore my little tantrum. Why shouldn’t they? Undeserving people don’t have suicidal ideation, they have conniptions. Why should anyone save me? When I couldn’t even save myself? Why should anyone love me? When I don’t?

One time, my foot almost slipped but I steadied myself.

“It looks peaceful now, but there’s nothing peaceful about dropping down from three hundred feet,” said a heavy male voice. “At that height your lungs will become pulverized flesh before you hit the water. Is that really what you want?”

He was trying to get me to rethink my decision, but to me it sounded like another man questioning my integrity. Let’s just end the tantrum now, so I can go home and do whatever mundane task makes me feel numb.

“Why do you care?” But I hadn’t finished my thought, when I was pulled back off the ledge, by an immense power that had me in its arms, and was now setting me down. I felt his breath on me, and it made me feel strange. I turned to face the man and to berate him, but when I saw him my mind went blank.

The dark, terrifying look in his eyes was no joke. I felt overwhelmed by him. That had never happened before. He was rude and impolite. Rough around the edges. His gaze was cold, but his voice had a soothing authority. He was in one of his countless dark suits that were his signature. And when I saw him, I felt relieved. It was like I’d met my life’s purpose. Like I’d been hurtling through the cosmos, blind, and without a destiny and he gave me one. He was fated to be the man who would break my heart at last. The heart I’d kept under careful scrutiny, sheltered, for this long, he tore through the heavy vaults and ripped it right out of my chest. From that point onward, there was no me, and no him.

There was only us.

This primal, beastly creature standing before me was Rho. His dark past and his alarming present was mine. His messy brown hair and his unkempt, week old stubble was mine too. And his lips were… captivating. He was all muscle and raw power.  

It was all I could think when I stood against him. I think I might have tried to kiss him when he abruptly grabbed my face in his hands and tilted my head back. “Show me your eyes.”

Why stop there? I can show you a lot more.

I don’t know what he saw, but what I saw was a man with a sad story and a starving soul. He was the kind of sad that frequently becomes resentful and short tempered.

He caught me staring and looked annoyed. “How much did you take?”

He was asking but I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I didn’t have a voice. Or at least my brain thought I didn’t. “How much did you take, Adam?”

He knew my name. How did he know my name? I saw my wallet in his hand with the driver’s license. He must have gotten it from my pocket. Right, that’s how he knows. It was good of those mob guys to leave me my wallet. Out of nowhere, the man grabbed the back of my head and pushed his fingers into my mouth, and I thought that was a weird form of foreplay, until it occurred to me that he was trying to get me to throw up. The moment I started retching, I moved away from him and I was screaming in pain from the pain my ribs were causing, but I managed to expel the contents of my stomach, right there on the sidewalk.

“Sounds to me like someone beat the shit out of you,” he said. “Your ribs don’t seem too happy about it.”

I had one hand to my chest, where the pain was the worst, right under my pectoral as I continued to spew a hundred or so pills on the pavement. You shouldn’t have tried to save me. I was teary-eyed and sick. I felt a little dizzy when I tried to stand up straight. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, hoping there was nothing more left to purge.

“My name is Rho,” the man introduced himself. “Judging by the bruises and your general behavior, I’m assuming you’re a whore.”

The words felt like a searing, hot knife being thrust into my chest. “I’m not a whore. I own these clothes, I didn’t get some John to pay for it!”

He was surprised that I was angry. “We’re all whores, kid. Everyone who survived, had to sell himself or his principles at some point.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t stand being rude to him, but I also didn’t want him to think I would trade myself just to get somewhere. “I haven’t had to… sell my soul.” Yet, I wanted to add.

He lit up a cigarette and started smoking in front of me, not in the least bit apologetic. I don’t know why I liked it. He didn’t give a shit about convention. It sounded like the kind of thing a free person would do. Not like me who was always trying to please others. It made me curious about him. “Are you…?”

“Gay? Yes. I might be bisexual.”

I realized something. “That’s why you stopped and no one else did.”

“You want to split hairs or you want to get going?”

I hesitated before saying the next words. I don’t have anywhere to go. The words trembled on my lips but I never uttered them. Just because he tried to save me, didn’t mean I could load that on him. Besides, no stranger would help me, when they didn’t even know me.

“Do you have a place you can go?” he demanded bluntly.

“I’ll be fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He was going to make me say it. I didn’t want to come across as a helpless, homeless person. But that’s what you are now. I don’t know why I was trying to save any dignity. He caught me mid suicide attempt and then I did just throw up in front of him. And he did just shove his fingers up my throat to make it happen.

“My landlord kicked me out,” I recounted my story to him. “Because I haven’t paid him for the past three months.”

“Why haven’t you paid him?”

“Because I don’t have money. I lost my job, three months ago and I’ve been looking for one since then, but I haven’t been lucky.”

“Yeah, well, employers don’t take kindly to people with priors.”

His words took me by surprise. I tried to hide it but there was no point lying to him. “It wasn’t even real prison!”

“But someone pressed charges.”

“It was a stupid shoplifting charge,” I explained. “It wasn’t even me, it was my friend, I was just supposed to be his lookout, and he would pay me enough to get me out of trouble.”

He listened patiently. Then, he tossed his cigarette aside. “I don’t know you,” he said. “You could be lying for all I know. But the fact is, you tried to kill yourself, so this must be weighing down on you. I’d say that is a man with a conscience.”

I didn’t know what to say. He continued talking. “Full disclosure, I belong to a dark, sadistic world. I’m not going to lie, half the time, I don’t want to be part of it but I have no choice. So, I’m giving you one. You can try to make it work in the world that exists above ours, the world of fake, frivolous people or you can join us, the underbelly of that fake, frivolity, and resort to living a life of secrecy and crime. There are no guarantees you’ll fare well with me but there are also no guarantees you’ll do better without me. The only difference is with me you’ll always have a home. Like every self-respecting thug, I own an apartment. I don’t pay rent and neither will you.”

I wish I had known our lives were about to be intertwined. I wish I’d celebrated it more, been more grateful. To the world, I was already a criminal. Whore. In his world, the rules were different. I wanted to go down the rabbit hole. I wanted to see this other world that existed just outside of mine, and I wanted to see it with him. It also made me realize this would probably be a ‘no going back’ kind of situation. “Why do you want to do this for me?”

“Have you looked at yourself? You’re a pathetic creature. Of course, I feel sorry for you. I’m doing you a favor, kid. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You can go with me, or you can go back. Your call.”

My eyes were tearing up again. I wished there was something holding me back. I wished there was some purpose, some need for me back where I was from. The people who had given birth to me, or the ones that raised me, but foster families, social service workers, and counselors weren’t family. Maybe for some lucky kids out there the system worked but not for me.

“I’ve been where you are, Adam. That loneliness doesn’t go away.”

He was being kind. Even in his extreme crudeness, he was being generous. He might have been tactless but he wasn’t spiteful. His heart was in the right place. Most of his annoyance was made of worry. He could find a dozen whores to fuck and he didn’t have to bring them back to his apartment to stay. Perhaps, he was a bit lonely. But most people deal with loneliness by paying for company, not paying for your life. The rest of your life, it occurred to me suddenly. That’s what he was implying. That I could stay with him, for an infinite amount of time—in what capacity?  

There was no contempt in his eyes anymore, merely a surface coldness that I was dying to thaw out. I was still waiting to respond to him, when my head started to spin. The remaining fifty pills were wreaking havoc on my body and brain.

“Adam, you okay?”

“There… there are people after me…”

I felt his hand on my shoulder, steadying me. “I’m not afraid of some smalltime crooks. I’ll handle it. Adam, are you okay?”

“F…fine.”

“Okay, here’s the thing,” Rho said. “I’m taking you home. Try not to make me regret it.”

Too late, I thought.

“Adam, what’s wrong?”

I couldn’t tell him that I was fine this time, because my body was going cold and my head was getting heavy. I felt the panic rising within me, as if my body was trying to tell me something. Stars danced before my eyes. I needed Rho’s strength to stay upright. The pain in my chest was bad now, and my throat felt constricted as my jaw tightened. I struggled to breathe.

“Adam, hey!” Rho’s voice was the last thing I heard.