The First First

Everyone thinks I’m an asshole. Either they think I actually didn’t care about my son, or they think I’m using him in some dark way to fuck with people. What no one considers is that there is no good way to deal with losing your child. There’s only mania, fits of spitting rage and hysterical bouts of laughter and tears. Bloody, ripped jeans where your knees hit the asphalt in the grocery store parking lot. Back breaking fatigue that blurs your vision after day three of forgetting to eat. A dented fender where you reversed into the pylon in your apartment complex parking lot, not once, but twice!

“Hey Marty, thanks for coming. It’s good to see you.

“Oh, hey Megan. Yeah, thanks for having us. Good to see you, too.”

Megan works with Elise. She came to the funeral. She means well.

“How are you? I mean, obviously bad, but, all things considered, are you doing OK? Finding ways to cope? Or maybe not cope, but you know, like, deal? Like, you know, move on, or whatever?”

If I let her, she'd spend the last hour of the year tripping on her words. Poor thing, I should say something.

“I’m fucking miserable, but you know, I drink a lot so that helps. Snorting crushed up Xanax to get out of bed, but honestly, who doesn’t these days, am I right?”

She’s smiling, her eyelids sucked back into her skull, waiting for me to tell her that I’m kidding before she’ll exhale.

“I’m just fucking around. About the Xanax, anyway.”

I hold up my glass and she clinks it with hers. She’s questioning inviting me now. When your kid OD’s, jokes about drugs are in very poor taste. That’s what makes them funny, though. She’s staring at the whiskey coke in my hand, wondering about my crack about drinking more. That one was true. If people ask how I’m doing, I’m not going to lie. Everyone here knows I’m basically a functional alcoholic, but since Marty died, I’ll admit, I’ve been dancing a little too close to just being a plain old drunk. Elise has done her best to keep me distracted, to find activities that don’t involve drinking. She’s trying to do for me what I tried to do for Marty, but outside of church and AA, there isn’t really anywhere to go that won’t try to sell you a beer, and fuck if I’m going to church or AA. Not now.

“Well, hopefully the new year is a lot better for you.”

“Can’t be much worse than this one, could it? Maybe if Elise died, but even still, a girlfriend doesn’t rank as high as a son, so…no, I’m kidding. Sorry. I can’t help it. It’s how I deal with shit, I make stupid jokes, just ignore me. Seriously though, thank you. Thanks for inviting us, and I’m sorry I’m such a pain in the ass.”

Four months of this. Four months of apologizing every time I’m honest. Four months of having to make everyone else around me feel better. People say something because they’re terrified of an elephant in the room. If my dead son doesn’t come up in conversation, they’ll think that I think they are avoiding the subject, so they do their best to say something kind, to ask me if I’m OK and get it out of the way so they can move on with their evening. It’s hilarious because they don’t want to actually talk about Marty, because they know his death was his own fault, because he was an addict who thought he was invincible, who thought it was so fucking cool to waste his talent, to crumble up his good grades and high SAT scores and to hang around with a bunch of low lifes snorting heroin. Knowing this, they blame me by extension. How can they not? I’m his father. Or I was. Is the relationship past tense now? Who fucking knows. But it’s hard for them to see Marty as an independent person. They weren’t there when he was fifteen and I found the vodka bottles under his bed. They didn’t hear me ream his ass over that, and then again with the pot and the Oxy. They didn’t see me crying over his hospital bed when he was seventeen and the paramedics had to bring him back from the edge of death with Narcan. They sure as shit didn’t read the letters or hear the speeches or in any way witness the amount of effort, the constant day after day, pleading with my son to please, think. My beautiful, intelligent, funny, God he was so fucking funny, To put that shit away and to find something else, anything else to be addicted to that could have a positive effect on his life, or at least not threaten to end it.

“They don’t know about the boxing lessons, and the gym memberships, or the early mornings where I would bang on his door right after sunrise, not just so we could go jogging together, but so I could make sure he was still alive! To make sure that the night before, and whatever careless and intoxicating adventures that it contained didn’t kill him. Does anyone know what it’s like? Do any of these people fucking know? Have they prayed to God, ‘Please let him be alive, please open the door, please don’t be fucking dead, please God, look out for my son God! He’s a good kid! He’s such a good kid, God, he’s just young and he’s dumb and he just thinks, I, I don’t know what he thinks, he thinks it’s all a big laugh! That nothing bad can happen, that he has it all under control, but please, God, let him open this fucking door! Let him stand there looking at me with his messy hair and his clothes smelling like cigarettes and that smile, my boy’s beautiful smile. He was such a good kid, God…’”