Chapter 33: Gerry makes a speech.
I find Gerry around back, smoking next to the dumpster. His eyes are cloudy and red, but I suspect it’s not from cigarette smoke. He takes a last, deep drag when he sees me coming, then shakes his head, crushes out his cigarette on the brick wall and flicks the butt away.
“I’m sorry,” I say when I get close enough. “Dutch pissed me off, and I said something I didn’t mean.”
He grunts. “Dutch pisses everyone off, eventually.”
It’s his way of saying he accepts my apology.
“Yeah. But I still shouldn’t have said it. And it’s wrong, anyway. You’re not fucked-up.”
He shrugs. “May as well call a spade a spade. I’m the family fuck-up. Everybody knows it. Always have been. Always will be.”
“You’re not. You’re the family success story.”
He scoffs. “Says the professional fucking athlete.”
“You are. It took guts, getting clean, coming back here.” I fall silent for a moment. We stare out together at the grey horizon. “You know how this town is,” I continue, glad he wasn’t inside to hear Dutch’s comment about Rhianna Fucking Jerkins. “Everyone always running their mouths. Everyone up in everyone else’s business.” I nudge him with my elbow. “Everyone knowing your story. But you came back anyway. That’s not what a fuck-up does.”
He shakes his head. “That’s exactly what a fuck-up does. Comes home with his tail between his legs, begging his Mom and Dad to take him in because he has nowhere else to go and they’re the only people left on Earth he can even ask.”
“You could’ve asked me,” I say softly. “I would’ve taken you in.”
“You live in Europe. I have a record. They probably wouldn’t even let me into the friggin’ country.”
He’s right, but I don’t say so out loud.
We go back to staring at the horizon. Soul Mountain’s on the outer edge of town, so behind the restaurant, there’s more-or-less nothing. A vacant lot. A boarded-up convenience store. A patchwork asphalt road that stretches into a no-man’s-land of empty fields until it hits the highway.
“You know why I started using?” he asks, pulling another cigarette from a crumpled cardboard box.
“Because your friends were doing it?” I guess.
“Naw. I mean, they were, but that’s not why I got into it the way I did. I started using because I was like, ‘What’s the fucking point?’ I was looking around at everybody, and it was like, what were they doing, really? Why were they working so hard?” He lights his cigarette up, takes a drag, exhales the smoke through his nostrils. “Take Dad, for example. He runs away from Nepal, gets treated like a fucking slave at his brother-in-law’s restaurant, scrimps and saves, gets to Ohio, slaves away some more, only to get laid off from his job a few months after he gets here. And he and Mom, they go from job to job, plant to plant, layoff to layoff, and they work and pinch pennies and they scrimp some more and finally they open the restaurant, and they bleed for that fucking thing, and meanwhile their kids are all fighting with each other, and fighting with everybody else, and nobody’s all that fucking happy, and it’s just like… why? For what? People struggle and struggle and struggle, and then — then they just… die. And that’s it. A bunch of struggling with a fucking death at the end. And I figured, if I had to go through all that too, at least I was going to have some fun along the way. At least I’d find a way to get high.”
I turn my head, study my brother’s profile. “That’s pretty fucking bleak, Ger.”
“Yeah, well. That was how I saw things for a long time.”
I note the past tense in his words. “And now? You still see it that way?”
“No. I don’t. Which is why I came back. I mean, besides the fact that I needed Mom and Dad’s help to get on my feet again.”
He smokes in silence for a minute or two, and I just wait, because I know this side of Gerry. He’s always had a dark, philosophical streak to him that none of the rest of us really have, a deep vein of nihilism that I’ve never really understood. And he doesn’t show this side of himself to many people, so when it comes out, I just give him space, let him say what he needs to say.
“You know how they say addicts have to hit rock bottom before they’re ready to get clean? I kept falling and falling, and I thought I just didn’t have a fucking bottom, but I finally hit mine,” he says after another drag. “Right before I decided to get clean once and for all. I was in Texas. San Antonio. Don’t ask me how I got there, I don’t even fucking know. I was with some guys, and some skanky meth-head girl, holed up in some shooting gallery or another outside of town. You know what a shooting gallery is, right?”
I nod, remembering the term from one of the “family days” I went to during Gerry’s first couple rounds of rehab. It’s a place where junkies go to shoot up, the kind of place that used to be called a “crack house,” until crack went out of style and heroin came back in.
“Anyway. We’d been pushing too hard for too long, me in particular, and I overdosed.” He crushes the cigarette out, flicks it away. “I died, Ani. Literally fucking died.”
He turns, searches my face a moment, maybe checking to make sure I’m taking him seriously, then looks away. “I saw the tunnel, the white light, all that shit. And I was floating away, looking down on my body, looking down on all the other nodding fucking junkies, and I felt better than I had in my whole sorry-ass life. Higher than any high I’d ever known. Because that white light? It was like… just love, man, pure fucking love. Connected to everyone. To everything. So there I am, floating up into the light, right? Merging with all this love. Disappearing into it. And I’m looking down on my body and on everyone else in the shooting gallery, and then I have this thought: ‘What a waste.’ That’s what I think. ‘What a waste, there’s so much love to give, so much love to have and to share, and these guys? They’re never going to know that. They’re just going to go from shit hole to shit hole, thinking that’s all life is. Just like I did.’” Gerry sniffs hard, meets my eyes. “And as soon as I have that thought? Boom.” He snaps his fingers. “I’m back in my body. Sitting up. Gasping for air. And you can call bullshit if you want, but I know I got sent back here for a reason. I’m supposed to share that love with people. To make things better. To help people get a little taste of what I got.” He turns away from me, shakes his head a few times. “I probably sound like I’m fucking crazy,” he mutters.
“It’s not crazy, Ger.” I feel the tears spill onto my cheeks, let them stay there a few seconds before I wipe them away. “That’s why you came back home? Because of… the love?”
He attempts a smile. “Yeah. I have a lot of love I want to give back. Figured I should start with my family.” There’s a pause, and he sighs. “I get that I owe everyone. But sometimes? With all the drama? It’s hard to remember that’s what I’m here for.”
His words trigger another round of tears for some reason, and with the lump that’s clamping around my vocal cords, I just nod instead of trying to speak. Finally, I clear my throat a couple times and say quietly, “Yeah. Yeah, I hear ya on that one, baby brother.”
We stand in silence next to the dumpster for a few more minutes. Gerry starts to pull another cigarette from his pack, thinks better of it, puts the pack back in his pocket.
“Hey, can I ask a favor?” I say.
He shrugs.
“Could you give me a couple hours between lunch and dinner? Just maybe from three o’clock to five o’clock? And then I promise I’ll be back before the dinner rush.”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you take off for now?” I suggest. “I can handle lunch by myself. Maybe you could come back at three, when I leave.”
He adjusts his baseball cap. “It’s okay. It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”
“Oh yeah? How are those applications for school coming along?”
“They’re not. I haven’t really worked on them in a couple weeks. Not since we found out Momma’s sick.”
“Then go home,” I say. “Work on your applications for a while. Just be back by three.”
#
Dutch and PJ are gone by the time I get back inside, which is probably for the best. Lunch is a little busier than usual, since it’s a Saturday, but nothing we can’t handle. Gerry returns a little before three, giving me a chance to run home, change clothes, air up the dusty playground ball at the bottom of my closet and still make it to the park by Jenny’s old house before three-thirty. Since it’s Saturday, I’m expecting to have to fight for court space, but it’s cold and the grey sky has turned into the lightest of drizzles, so there’s only two little kids there when I arrive, and I take the side of the court they’re not using.
It’s nice to have a ball in my hands again; I’ve spent nearly a week away from courts and balls and sneakers, and the first shot I take brings pure relief. It’s that Ahhh… feeling that Dutch gets from shopping and PJ gets from eating and Gerry used to get from sticking a needle in his arm.
We all have our addictions, I suppose. Maybe the four of us are more alike than we like to admit.
I chase the ball, shoot, rebound, shoot, chase the ball again. I fall into a comfortable rhythm, find myself wishing Alex were here so I could kick her ass. Wishing Alex were here so I could talk through all the things going through my head right now. Because there’s a lot on my fucking mind — Soul Mountain, money, Mom’s cancer, Dad, Dutch, Amy, Jenny, divorces, drug addictions. And the speech Gerry gave out by the dumpster in between pulls on his cigarette.
It’s mainly the speech that I keep coming back to, rebounding it in my head over and over again, like it’s a ball that just fucking refuses to fall through the hoop.
Love.
Family.
Connection.
The past.
The future.
Paying it back.
Paying it forward.
Getting my life together.
“You came home because your career’s over and you don’t know what else to do. Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.” That keeps coming back to me, too. And as much as I hate to confirm Dutch’s high opinion of herself and low opinion of me, I have to admit that she usually has a way of being right about these sorts of things.
By the time the alarm I set on my phone goes off at four-fifteen, I think I have a plan. It’s a crazy fucking plan — scary as shit, too, that’s for damned sure. But it’s a plan.