Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [21]
“Jesus,” Lewis said after his first sip. “No wonder you guys stay up all night, drinking this tar.”
“This ain’t strong,” said Chuck. “Drink a cup over at Red’s. He has that burnt-tasting stuff in little cups.”
“Espresso?”
“Shit, I don’t know.” Chuck had a forearm tattoo of a woman sunk ass-first in a martini glass with a banner that said MAN’S RUIN.
“Who’s been over to Red’s?” asked Gene.
“He had me over there fixing a drain,” said Chuck.
“He never once asked me over,” said Gene.
“He doesn’t ask anybody over,” said John. “He lives there for a little privacy. I catch one of you over there buggin’ him, you’re out the same as for drinking or drugging.”
“I wish he still lived over here with us,” said Gene.
“Red never lived in this house,” said Chuck.
“That’s right,” said John.
“Did so,” said Gene. “I heard he was here till he was going to get married. Then he fixed up his place. Only the girl dumped him.”
“Pure caca,” said John.
“That’s not what I heard,” said Lee. With long blond hair and rock-star good looks, he was, at nineteen, the youngest guy at the farm. “I heard Red lived here till Ernie chased him out with a shotgun.”
The men in the parlor burst out laughing, even Lewis.
“I’m just telling you what I heard,” said Lee.
“It’s those voices in your head again,” said John.
“I don’t have voices in my head,” said Lee.
“You’re crazier than a rat in an oil drum,” said John. “You all are. A bunch of moody, sad-sack girls. Red this, Red that.”
Lewis slipped from the room. Except for John, he didn’t much mind the men. Or even being here at Round Rock. The almost heady lack of responsibility is how he’d always imagined life in a pricey private mental ward. Things could be a lot worse; he’d already heard stories of treatment programs where residents were made to pick up fields of dog shit, march in formation, and stay in group therapy sessions until everyone was blubbering. Here, nobody said boo as he slumbered through the days. Still, moving on through the dark, shabby rooms, he finally had to park himself on a dusty sofa, light a cigarette, and puzzle out how he, Lewis Fletcher, had come to be in a facility for recovery from alcoholism when, so far as he could tell, he wasn’t alcoholic.
Young Lee had confided at dinner that his last high was an ounce of hash, an eightball of coke, six Quaaludes and a dash of crystal, all hastily washed down with Cuervo shooters as police crossed a dance floor to arrest him for punching a bouncer. “Pooped my pants in the squad car,” he concluded cheerfully. At another meal, the men at Lewis’s table discussed what they drank when the booze ran out. Vanilla extract. Mouthwash. Aftershave. Everybody agreed aftershave was the worst—because of the burps it gave you. Lewis had never owned such a stash as Lee’s, nor had he sampled any one of the potions listed by his tablemates. At worst, he’d been playing a little fast and loose with alcohol in the last term.
He’d taken the last two quarters off to save money and finish a raft of incompletes. Six incompletes. Six incompletes out of nine courses. Without classes to attend, he began to feel peripheral, like the hangers-on lurking around every graduate program. The papers haunted him. “Flaubert and Racism in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” “Swedenborg, Blake, and Valuation of the Imagination,” “Inscape and Individuation: Concepts of Self in Hopkins and Jung” … Where to start? Always, it seemed, with a little lubrication, a quick stop at the Think Tank, where he invariably ran into a colleague or a professor, someone, at any rate, who bought him one more drink, and one more after that. Many Round Rock residents blamed their drinking on raging fathers, pillhead mothers, overcontrolling wives and girlfriends. Lewis blamed his on literary culture.
LAWRENCE, a sweet homosexual speed freak who manned the clothes room, took Lewis under his wing, at least sartorially. “You have to class up. Beatniks are so passé,” Lawrence said, and slipped him freshly laundered, donated clothing, all of it