Novel Treatments / Chapter 2--Way South (Analysis)

Chapter 2

It’s funny how I can let something consume me completely, only to suddenly let go of it and move onto something else. I didn’t exactly get a girlfriend, nor convert from beer to Jesus. I simply began to think how silly I was being: Why would the grass be greener on the south side of the hill?

I’d been to Mexico several times as a kid and had never ventured farther than Acapulco on an aborted trip with my parents as an eight-year-old. I’d slipped a half-eaten avocado in my sister’s bed while she was sleeping as a revenge for being banished to the ground when it came time to sleep. This fruitful assault was the climax to five days of sibling warfare that had the whole family back on a return flight home a week earlier than scheduled.) Then there was Tijuana, which was definitely the browner side of the hill, and after a knife fight erupted in front of me at a crowded club, a place I vowed never to return to.

Central America, I told myself, was probably filled with bandits and Sandinistas. Far from being adventurous, I would be foolhardy to go traipsing through land-mined jungles and thug-infested downtowns. And I only had to stand in front of the mirror and look at my bump—that was still tender to the touch—to realize that I’d had enough mishaps for a while.

I decided what I really needed to break the monotony was a weekend jaunt to a place where I felt alive, a place that was the very antithesis to the suburbia that had been the punching bag of my chronic lament. New York City.

Ever since my younger cousin, Troy, had had his own grand epiphany, I’d visit him a couple of times a year. In 1999, he’d been living in a town home in San Tana working as a computer programmer (which, depending on your bent, could be far worse than having to sell software by cold call to executives in Minnesota.) He went to the Big Apple to celebrate New Year’s with a college pal who was living there at the time. Troy’s realization—spinning around intoxicated in Times Square, ball dropping, ice sleets, ditto—was that he could do programming remotely and not really have to show up at an office everyday. I guess he was pretty good at what he did, because when he proposed that he work from Manhattan and come back to California a few times a year, his boss said okay.

I wouldn’t say my cousin was exactly a poster child for getting away from it all, but he at least flashed a glimmer of hope that switching towns on a whim wasn’t tantamount to declaring insanity. Still, he didn’t harbor any delusions (at least to my knowledge) of wanting to take his laptop on a bus trip down through Central America. In fact, I thought again that I’d been bumped in the head pretty hard thinking I want to quit it all for some unknown, albeit possibly exotic, quantity. A simple weekend in a city that might as well be the rest of the world coming to you would, I guessed, put to rest any fantasies to just go wandering off.  

And with Troy living in New York, I didn’t have to worry about having a traveling partner. Which, more importantly, meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone getting a DUI, though I didn’t want a repeat of my Mexican bar behavior by being at the receiving end of some Jersey thug’s fist.

With the end of the sales quarter approaching and Spackmann hovering accusingly about my cube each day, a knowing smirk on his face, I had to come down with a particularly virulent strain of flue. When I called in Friday morning, however, he was hardly convinced.

“You’re kidding me. I got at least half of the corporations out in the Dallas area that haven’t even been prospected yet. That’s like 20 potential leads.”

“It’s really bad. I’m curled up.” I tried to enunciate each word as slowly as possible, the way I imagined someone who was actually febrile and fetal would.

“Fine. Can you come in this afternoon?”

My plane was two hours away and I imagined I’d actually be 30,000 feet over Dallas come that time.

“I’ll try… but it’s not good.”

“Matt Philips you better look like you spent all weekend in bed come Monday.”

When Monday came I was once again flying in the air back from New York. My head literally in the clouds. Come Tuesday—I had continued my weekend binge in New York by drinking beer deep into Mon. night—I showered and mouth-washed and came in eyes bloodshot, gait unsteady and generally sick. Though I think Spackmann was hardly fooled. But it didn’t matter. By Wed. I was walking into my manager’s office with some interesting news.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My first night in New York, I’d gotten split up from Troy in a bar in the Lower East Side. He had told me to stay put while he went off to find his Russian friend Mishka, who’d had a history of disappearing after drinking too much and getting into trouble. I hardly had any reason to judge.

That Mishka had a thing for firearms and had decided that he would take his new gun out to show his friends (there were no bullets in, of course. I’m not crazy, he confided the next day.) That a burly bartender had caught Mishka in the bathroom taking a dump, the pistol on his lap as though he would waste anyone who tried to grab his roll of toilet paper. That the bartender would banish Mishka from the bar for life and that Mishka would return to his apartment to drown himself in the Russian vodka he’d kept in the freeze. That Troy was running across town at one in the morning looking for Mishka after getting a tip from a spectator that, some drunk dude with a piece went running across Tompkins Square Park… well, that was a bit extreme.

Or simply the long-story of why I was in a bar alone in the Lower East Side hanging out with a bottle of Belgium beer in my hand and wondering if the 9.0 % alcohol on the label would translate into something I’d come to regret the next day.

After getting into one of those semi-drunk states where I had one of those conversations with myself that at the time seemed profoundly enlightening, I wobbled over to the bathroom. From out of the dark, blob of the crowd, I heard someone call my name. I figured the odds of another Matt in the bar were pretty high, so I continued my bathroom trajectory. Only when I heard Matt paired with Phillips did the odds drop a little. I turned to see a stranger smiling at me.

“Is that really you?” A slightly overweight, broad-shouldered guy in late-20’s stared, eyes a-bulge, at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Just in town hanging out,” I nodded my head slowly trying to buy time in figuring out who the hell this was talking to me in some dive bar.

“It’s Joe.”

“Yeah, Joe.”

This still didn’t ring a bell, and this Joe obviously caught on. “Rutgers.”

“Yeah…I went to Rutgers…”

I was still not sure if he had the right Matt Phillips. I peered at the face, imagining the effects of five years and evenings hanging out in Lower East Side bars reversed and then it came back—Joe Taratello, center strike of the Intramural soccer team. He could thread his way on fleet feet through most formidable defense. Or at least that was five years ago. Joe looked like he would have difficulty threading his way to the bar for another drink.

“I know, the weight.” Joe smacked a belly. “Jeez, Phillips you still look the same. Lay off those steroids,” he joked, pointing at muscles I’d developed over the last few years, not so much out of motivation but as a default of having not much to do in San Tana.

He chuckled good-naturedly and turned to his left.

“This is my friend, Steven.”

A head shorter than Joe, Steven had an intense look on his face like he had just had the soccer ball passed to him and was driving up the field to score.

“Hey, what’s up?” I said sticking out my hand and feeling Steven’s fingers crush my bones.

“How do you know Joe?” Steven thankfully released my hands and I noticed veins swelling out of his neck like he was a provoke pit bull.

“We went to Rutgers for a year. I transferred after a couple of semesters… damn I haven’t seen Joe in, what…

“Five years.”

“Yeah, five years,” I replied.

“Matt and I basically roomed together freshman year.”

“Yeah, my roommate was a psychopath. I once woke up in the middle of the night sketching a picture of me sleeping.” I thought back to the picture and shuddered slightly.  “Thank god Joe lived right down the hall.”

“Little did Phillips know I start sketching his backside every time he passed out in my room.”

We laughed and clanked our glasses together in collective commiseration for all that is woeful about college freshman year. It wasn’t long before we were commiserating on a lot more.

“I used to think New York was the shit. You get into this cycle where you work and work.” Steven was seated on a bar stool near the back of the bar, where we’d found a place to sit. “And work.”

“Oh, my. This guy used to work,” Joe added.

“The carrot on a stick.”

“80 hours a week?”

“It was insane. Consultant for one of the big fives. What do you expect? So I do my routine. Work like a monkey, sometimes all the way to Sat. night and then? Mind annihilation. Anything hard. Vodka, tequila, gin (no tonic.)” Steve stood up and started pounding his fist into his other hand after each word.

“You just keep running and running,” Joe added and their whole shtick almost sounded like a sales pitch, or at least a story they’d told a few times.

“And I wanted to keep running, because I saw the carrot not the stick,” Steve continued. “Junior partner, senior partner. Always just in front of me. A little bit more. Pound the liquor on weekends at the best clubs in the city, easily putting down 5 bills on bottle service. But I don’t care because I’m going places.

Steve had worked himself in to a giddy glee, his eyes slightly glazed, a grin covering his face. “Tell him Joe. What did they do?”

“What did they do, Steve?” Joe shouted back in chorus.

“They fucked me in the ass. They fucked me in the ass.”

By this point a few heads from the adjacent table turned towards us, assessing whether this buzz cut with swelling trapezius muscles who’d began maniacally screaming, “they fucked me in the ass,” would impose serious bodily harm on them.

“All those hours, all those promises,” Steve continued. “They kept me at the same point. Milking my monkey ass. And that’s when I pulled the dildo out. And said enough of this shit.” Fortunately, he did not act this part out.

“And then?” Steve asked working himself into the frenzy of a climax. “I quit and moved to Brazil. Just straight up moved to Brazil.”

“I love this story, ha! It just gets better every time,” Joe chimed.

For a moment this Steven guy, did not seem like such a demented fool I had initially taken him for. A holy fool, maybe, for he’d done what I’d been thinking of doing, what others had thought of doing but had never acted on. I was intrigued.

“Why, Brazil?”

“Why not, Brazil,” Steven countered smugly.

“Why not Mexico, or Costa Rica? I mean.”

“Steven, or should I say Bean, does ju-jitsu,” Joe offered.

I’d heard Joe refer to Steven several times as Bean, trying to figure out the connection.

“Brazilian, that is, Gracie ju-jitsu,” Steven explained, “was the one thing that  kept me sane. Never had enough time to do it in New York. One day I came home from work and realized I’d been living a lie. No promotion in sight, one big lie. The only thing in my life that was true, ju-jitsu.”

I noticed that when Steven got passionate he’d look away, head slightly down, and begin to slightly wave his head side to side like a punch-drunk prizefighter.

“Here I was blowing a G a week on nightlife and I knew it had to be better,” Steven’s head spun around in half-revolutions. “I mean after three months in Brazil…”
He stopped bobbing his head and seized on the table next to us. “The nightlife here is so bad. These people are all like a bunch of rats, bunch or rats,” he began to yell animatedly.

“So what’s the deal with this Bean thing,” I pressed, hoping not to scare the table next to us anymore.

        “The ju-jitsu guys thought that Steven looked like Mr. Bean,” Joe laughed. “That British guy from that comedy show.”

        I tried to look discreetly at Steven. All neck and trapezius muscles, his head was a small bullet-shaped anvil and his nose a fleshy question mark, he looked a bit like Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) on a potent cocktail of human growth hormone and steroids. I tried not to laugh.

        “Yeah, I know. The Brazilian guys called me Bean as soon as I arrived in Brazil. And now that’s who I am. Bean,” he shrugged with a self-satisfied smirk. Then he stood up, clutched his head in both his hands, and started shaking his head. “I’m a Bean, Bean, Bean.”

        Clearly frightened, the group of people at the other table moved aside. I was a bit frightened myself and wondered if Joe simply tolerated Bean out of fear, or was actually taken in by his theatrics. Even if Bean was mentally unstable, he had gone south. Way south.

“So why did you come back?” I ventured.

“Joe, I like this man. He asks the right questions.” Steven took a long chug of beer. “Well, I saved up money for the trip and lived the three best months of my life. I came back for a little bit more to see folks but I got to get out of here soon. Very soon.

He sat back down on his stool. “In Brazil, I’m famous. Right, Joe? I’m famous.”

“Okay, hold on.” Joe stood up. “Before you tell that story, another drink. What do you think, Phillips?”

“Great idea.”

I didn’t get to hear why Bean considered him famous. At least not that night. We saddled up at the bar and before I even took a sip of some coal dark beer that tasted like a mixture of molasses and danger (I’m guessing the alcohol content was about the same as red wine), Bean had ensconced himself between a three blonde girls. Again, he was bobbing his head and had now started waving his hands like an impassioned dictator the worse for vodka. Surprisingly, the girls weren’t afraid and actually laughed coquettishly at Bean, whose smile became more demented with each giggle. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, and soon after I wasn’t much sure of anything.

I remember Troy coming back, his T-shirt stained with sweat, talking about his fucking roommate this, fucking roommate that. Joe and I reminisced college memories ordering a few more atomically strong beers with such improbable names as the End of the World or Mankind or something else equally catastrophic. I remember briefly running through the streets with Joe, impervious to the bitter November cold. But I’m not sure I even remember that.

I do remember waking up in a strange room the next morning.

The walls were painted a lime green and the room had that immaculate finish of a room hardly lived in—the curtains were finely pleated, a work desk looked un-worked on. I stood up and looked outside the window. I noticed that the roofs were low. There was no hunkering mass of buildings that typically block out the light in Manhattan. I wondered if I was even in the state of New York anymore.  Had I awoken from some dream of being a drunken, wayward 20-something and here was my comfy room, safe and sound from the perils of alcohol and aimlessness?

That scenario began to seem increasingly plausible as I walked around the room lifting up objects, a paperweight shaped like a grouper fish, red stripes in the middle, a copy of National Geographic, some island with fishing boats beside it. As soon as I felt the claws of a hangover digging into my temples, I had trouble convincing myself that I was some other person tucked away in his tidy den, and I slowly began to accept the reality that I’d gotten ridiculously drunk again, and had someone how woken up in a room, alone and far from the city.

        I ran through a mental checklist of the people who could have brought me to this alternate existence.

Joe: I’d learned he was living in the Upper East Side, from what little I remembered when he caught up over the dark ale, that was now responsible for the burgeoning pain inside my skull.

Bean: Joe mentioned something about Bean coming back from Brazil about two months earlier and living up in some shack deep in Hell’s Kitchen, spending his time writing a script. Didn’t seem a likely candidate.

Troy: his common gripe was New York’s cool factor diminished exponentially with each mile you moved out of The Village.

Mystery Woman: Had I hooked up with some girl who lived in Queens and Brooklyn? Had she sobered up and wondered what the hell the cat had dragged into her bed, depositing me into some guest room that hadn’t been slept in for years?

None of these sounded too believable, and as I pulled open the door the scenario of me waking up a different person seemed the least far-fetched. In front of me, I saw a middle-aged couple hesitantly smiling up at me from a breakfast table.

The woman, her hair in a bun, and a tentative smile forming at her lips, looked up at me. “Would you like some eggs?”

I wasn’t quite sure what the etiquette was in this case, so I played along like this was a typical day at Marzelli’s household, as they looked vaguely Italian and vaguely Marzelli-ish, Or at least something with an ‘I’ at the end.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

The man, a few tufts of gray shooting out of his head in protest against complete baldness, motioned me to sit with them. Playing the role of my new identity, I walked over and pulled one of four chairs from the table and sat down.

“Let me get you some orange juice,” the woman offered and stood up and headed to what I supposed was the fridge.

The old man begun ladeling oatmeal into a bowl he set in front of me. “Come on, eat. You look like you had a rough night.”

Strangely, I almost said, “thanks, pa” but I’m glad I didn’t. As soon as the woman brought the orange juice to the table, a door opened and Bean shuffled out, looking, I assume, even worse than I did.

“I see you met my parents?”

“Oh, yes, Hi.” I nodded sheepishly at the man and the woman. “Sorry,” I said about to offer my hand but then looked away. “Matt. Nice to meet you guys.”

“You look like you went on a real bender last night, Steven?” The mother had dropped her accommodating tone for a shriller one. “You know I can’t but help worry when you do things like this.’

Bean buried his head between his two thick forearms and looked down at the table.

“Well, Matt. I hope you’re not as nuts as Steven is. He insists on living in his own apartment when he can live at home right across the bridge. Then, he gets really drunk at 4 in the morning and decides, ‘Hey, why don’t I pay my folks a visit.’”

“Ma, can you please stop it.”

I wondered to why he’d brought us back here when we could have just crashed in the city at his place or Joe’s. Speaking of whom, I suddenly began to worry that he’d suffered a worse fate than waking up in a strange bed and carrying on conversation with a new set of parents. “Steven, do you know what happened to Joe?”

“Last I heard he was with you. I went looking for you guys after you left the Padded Wagon, or wherever it was we were drinking. I caught you running up and down the street. I tried talking to you but you were totally gone.”

If Bean’s mother had hoped that maybe I would bring her son back into an orbit of normalcy, those hopes seemed to vanish as she set on orange juice down at my spot, shaking her head.

“So, you two know each other through Joe?”

“Yeah, he’s Joe friend. He’s a cool guy.” Bean said, lifting his head up from the table.

“You’re not going to go taking off with Steven to Brazil?” his mother admonished me as she set down a plate of eggs in front of her husband.

Bean buried his head back between his arms. “Mom, can we not talk about this now.”

I had wanted to ask him more about Brazil but figured no was a pretty bad time.

For the next five minutes, I sat with the Bean family in silence, each of us lost in thought over our poached eggs and buttered toasts.

“So you’re not staying with Joe tonight?” Bean broke the silence.

“Yeah, actually I’m going to go back to my cousin Troy’s. And, uh, thanks guys for letting me stay here for the night.”

“No problem, would you like a toast?” Bean’s mother was suddenly pleasant again.

“Actually a quick one before I hit the road. But I have to get back to Troy’s. He’s probably freaking out about what happened to me.”

I remembered the Mishka incident and wondered if Troy had found his roommate or if he’d even realized I hadn’t come back.

“Do you know how to get back?” Bean’s mother asked.

“Uh, well…”

“Do you even know where we are?” she eyed me accusingly.

“Actually, no.”

The father guffawed. “Just like Steven. Running off to crazy places. Not knowing where you go.” His father had a slight accent and seemed genuinely amused.  

“You’re in Queens. I’ll walk you to the ‘L.’” Steven smiled for the first time that morning as though finally he wasn’t the brunt of his parent’s attack.

A few moments later, after I kindly refused several toasts swathed in Kleenexes, we were out in the bitter cold.

“So, tell me about Brazil.”

“That’s all I’ve been talking about these days. But not in there,” Bean motioned back towards the two-storey apartment we’d descended from. “I’m surprised we avoided an all out attack on my way of life. They still don’t understand.”

I told you a year ago I was living the dream life, working the dream job, sleeping in a Soho loft. My parents still see it like that. That I threw it all away and went to Brazil.”

“You ever plan to go back?”

“Once you make that step to leave your life behind there is never any going back.”

“No, I mean Brazil.”

Bean walked faster, dipping his head down, as though charging an invisible matador.

“For Carneval. I’m hoping in February. That’s when Carneval is right?”

“I don’t know.”

         “Yeah, I think it’s February. I got to make sure I got enough money to keep so I don’t have to come back. Ever.”

“How much is a plane ticket to Brazil?”

“You could probably squeeze one for a thousand. You coming from Cali, right?”

“Sure. But why not just go to Mexico? Is Brazil that great?”

“Let’s just say as soon I got back a couple of months ago I became totally depressed. Nothing has changed since then. I got to go back soon.”

“Really?”

“Basically I was a superstar. I was hooking up with the most beautiful girls in Rio, drinking champagne during the day. They wrote about me in the paper. I became famous. Or should I say notorious. Girls all wanting to get a piece of me. Here, I’m nothing.”

It sounded liked this Bean guy was deluded, though I started to hope he wasn’t. Or at least I hoped Brazil was that great; that I could just go there, and if maybe not end up in the newspaper for some bizarre reason, at least start a new life. End up learning the language and living in my own little apartment near the beach. Street vendors would know my name. Pretty girls would giggle as I walked by.

But I still wasn’t too sure about Brazil. The idea of south, assuming this Bean wasn’t a complete lunatic, familial strife aside, didn’t seem as nutty as before. “I’d been planning on going south very soon.”

“South where?”

“Just heading south through Mexico. Going on and on. To Panama.”

“Yeah, I hear Panama is great. Columbia, according to my jujitsu buddy Scotty, is even crazier.”

“Nice.”

“So when you leaving?”

“Well, I’m about to just quit my job as soon as the stock hits 35 and then just head south.”

“Solo?”

“I guess. My friend Salvador was supposed to come, but he got a DUI.”

“Its good you see it like that. Everyone thought I was completely nuts to give up my consulting gig. Best thing I ever did. Now I just got to get back to Rio. Or anywhere out of this country.”

Bean picked up his head and looked around contemptuously at the deserted streets with leafless trees buckling in the wind. “So, how close is the stock to 35?”

“Could be a matter of weeks. Then I just have to give my boss my two weeks notice.”

“You’ve got Joe’s cell, right?”

“Yeah, I think he gave it to me around our fourth pint of that crazy beer.”

“Let’s meet up at his place on the upper East side. Here’s my cell, just in case.”

Thinking back to those beers from the night before, made me aware of the pain pounding in my temples. Made me aware of how I was letting alcohol put me into situations where I’d lost any sense of judgment. Putting my fate up to the winds.

“Hey, Steven. Thanks, for, uh, making sure I didn’t end up without my kidneys in some Chinatown brothel.”

“No problem.” He looked away again and started bopping his head. “Usually, it’s me who is running around wasted, needing someone to make sure I don’t die.” He looked up and stretched out his hand. “I’ll see you at Joe’s tonight.”

With that, I disappeared into the maw of a subway station deep in the hinterland of Queens, a station I probably wouldn’t have been able to find on my own again for half the gold in Brazil.

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