When We Were Young Enough to Drink
by Max Paradise
Back when I lived with training wheels we spent nights drinking. I drank because of boredom and because it made my blood sing and because I was playing a game called the slowness of time, a game for children. Later on I learned to drink to the quick and play at a game called disappearance, or a game called perhaps I can be someone else for a little while. I drank with the other children and we threw our bodies at the world and each other, jumping fences armed with plastic bottles of vodka to float in neighbourhood pools and passing the Tucson winter nights in shorts and hoodies, emptying pitchers between stolen cigarettes behind the bar and whispering to one another with wine-stained mouths. Holding each other through the spins and collapsing in laughter against the bathroom stalls. The silence before I offered you the opportunity to fall asleep while I took to the couch. The animal cry when you answered the phone call from your brother in the corner of the bar.
We piled into cars and drove to karaoke. CJ sang and sometimes when he sang he drank and sometimes he sang without drinking. We hated him when he sang. Daniel drank and sometimes went home to his girlfriend and sometimes he drank and fucked around and sometimes he drank because his ex was more pregnant until she was no longer pregnant and he was something else entirely. Travis drank himself stupid, a desperation carved in rock. He drank shackled with terror. I drank because I couldn’t stand the fucking sight of things. I drank so I could shake it electric. You drank and shook it like a holy roller trying to remember a word or all the words that might be necessary, the word that might call us all back. You drank as an avenue to prayer.
Aaron had a brain injury in high school, a brain injury from when he attended a party and someone threw a rock when his head was turned in the opposite direction. He spent weeks at the hospital and took a gap year before college. He had trouble with circular thinking, after the rock. We do things and we can’t take them back. We drink to play at the game of pretend we never did this thing for a moment, a game of relief, a game of forgetting. After six drinks he sparked words like a roman candle. Now he is married and in Texas and even then when he was angry his face was a baby’s. We should not have let him drink.
Back then the boys believed we were family and thus were unspeakably cruel to each other. Each night a sport to bury each other, sketching cave paintings of penises in sharpie on cheeks if anyone passed out and giggling fight clubs held in the garage. Knuckles cracking skin in the dryness of the desert cold. When we drank without the girls we would ride bikes down to the taqueria in the shining midnight dark and I would smoke inside and slosh against my brothers’ shoulders.
Back then we believed the girls were not family and thus were unspeakably cruel to each other because we were terrified. When the girls drank we offered our turgid bodies up as worship. My rounding softness the prayer of stretch marks. Janella drank and sang like CJ except she sang like she was lovely and we loved her for the singing of it. Maria drank and her beauty was not diminished. You drank and laughed until you couldn’t breathe. Some nights your laughter sounded as if you should be crying. Lauren ordered a single shot with each beer and talked about her dreams or talked about her deaf sister who lived in silence and had ambitions as open as the sky and would someday hang the moon in the cavernous ink of space. Some nights she collapsed and asked whether we even liked her. Some nights she sobbed and knew we hated her.
I hated her because I wanted her to like me so much I could barely look her in the eye. I hated her because I gave her as much power over me as I could manage, handful after handful. I hated her for falling short of the person I believed her to be. I hated her so much that later I found it necessary to play at a specific adult game, the game of writing her a letter, one of many.
All I wanted was for everyone to feel ok because I was there. I believed we should be present for suffering, because I had read the Russians. Which is why I sat in the hospital waiting room and brought two cups of coffee filled to the brim with cream and sugar while you waited for the news. I believed you should be sober when you found out you were an orphan. That perhaps it might soften the edges of the morning when you remembered. Later when I became an orphan myself I remembered this and laughed until I couldn’t breathe, the sound ragged and hysterical.
When we drank together my lives were siloed and neat and clean and we were still friends. Much later I would write you a letter because I had lost your trace through the intervening years. I could have easily tracked you down, and the letter out of the blue would have been electric and washed me in the light of golden glory, centring the wrong party. So it ended up in my desk after I read it aloud to a strange man who by the time was no stranger at all. All so as to live up to that old chestnut of doing no additional harm. I hoped you might forgive me for my insistence upon your body, my insistence that you carry my shame for me when I would text to ask what you were wearing and whether you were seeing anybody and remind you of the time our bodies had huddled together behind the bar. Back then I believed your body to be both receptacle and tabernacle. You deflected because your grandmother was dying and because I was mostly married. Because you were not that kind of woman, when I was very much that kind of man.
I find it difficult to tell you how sorry I am. I hope somehow this sets things to rights or somewhat less askew.
Back when we were softer and sweeter there was the two of us daytime driving sober past fields and you told me about the year in high school when you played softball for the sheer hot joy of the playing and felt the wind on your skin and sun on your face and all the faces of your sisters then after practice you would ride your bike to your boyfriend’s house and help make dinner for him and his siblings until his mom got home from work and the two of you would hold hands and grab ass underneath the kitchen table with fingers fueled by the sheer hot joy of first times. That’s when I was happy, you said, when the world clicked into place and made sense, the green buzzing by the car window as you spoke.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Max Paradise resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, and his work has been previously published in Full Bleed and The Veldt. He has avoided social media for the time being.