It was a Friday when I noticed the fuel leaking out of my company truck. A fitting start to the weekend. I don’t own my own vehicle anymore; I just pilot these temporary pieces of a temporary life. I knew this was going to be an arrest, a goddamn anchor chained to my ankle. I took it easy, invited a young lady over to a dive bar within walking distance, and when we were done, I had her walk over to my place. Life was good, in its own cheap, transactional way. She left in the morning. Not a big deal.
On Saturday, I went to get some food. I’d been starving myself, a quiet, stupid punishment for a crime I hadn’t committed yet. I was in the parking lot of the grocery store, eating a pre-cooked chicken out of the plastic container like a goddamn animal, when someone knocked on my window. “There’s gasoline coming out of your vehicle,” she said. She was right. A huge, shimmering puddle of it was spreading under the truck. I filled it up, texted my superintendent, and figured that was that.
Then, on Sunday, I get a hit on Bumble. A hot-looking forty-year-old. She contacts me, gets my number, and the whole thing feels aggressive, rushed. I’ve seen this before. When a woman comes at you that hard, it only means one thing: she’s desperate. And it’s either going to be you, or it’s going to be the next guy in line. So you have to make a decision.
I thought about it. I needed to get out, to watch a sunset, to feel something other than the quiet, grinding dread of my own life. I forgot about the goddamn gas leak. She was eighteen minutes away. The fumes in the truck were pretty strong. By the time I got to her mom’s house and stopped the car, you could see it, just dripping like a stuck pig. We decided to take her vehicle.
We were going to a brewery. A perfect, beautiful, goddamn joke. Me, a man who doesn’t drink beer anymore, and her, a woman fresh out of recovery and supposedly on the righteous path to a sober life. A match made in hell. Before we even got out of her neighborhood, she had me stop at a Circle K. I figured it was for gum, or a bottle of water. “Come on in with me,” she said. She walked right up to the counter, and the clerk, some pimply kid who’d probably seen this show a hundred times, didn’t even have to ask. He just went straight for the little miniature bottles of booze behind the counter. “You want the Crown Apple?” he asked, his voice dead. “Yes,” she said. “How many?” “Three.” She was putting on a little show for the other cashier, a little gesture in my direction, like she was parading around her latest bad decision. When we got back in the car, she started twisting the cap off one of the little bottles. “What are you doing?” I asked her. She just smiled, a sad, stupid, beautiful little smile. And she downed all three of those little bastards before we even pulled into the brewery parking lot. A perfect pre-game for a woman on the path to a sober life.
She had a raspy voice, the kind you get from too many cigarettes and too much screaming. She said she only vaped, which I knew was a lie the second she said it. “I’ve had a real crazy week,” she told me, her hands shaking a little. “I just want to celebrate. I’m going to have a little drink or two. Break my seven months of sobriety.”
The brewery was only fifteen minutes away, but by the time we got there, the three little bottles had already done their work. She raced ahead of me from the car, opened the door to the place herself, and made a goddamn B-line for the bar like a moth heading for a bug zapper. When we sat down, she was already a little wobbly, a little too bright in the eyes. And now, seeing her for the first time in the light, I could really take inventory. Her skin wasn’t the greatest; you could see the fine, spidery wounds of a hard life etched around her eyes. She was in her forties, but she’d been living with her mom for the last three years, ever since the divorce. Her ex-husband, a defense lawyer down in San Luis Obispo, fifteen years older than her, a real shark. Apparently, he’d managed to chew his way out of their fourteen-year marriage by only having to pay for the goddamn maintenance on her dog. The rest of the burden, the whole beautiful, broken mess of her, he’d just dumped on her mother’s doorstep.
There was no courtship. She sat herself down at the bar like she owned the place, like she was clocking in for a shift. She struggled with what to order, a brief, pathetic moment of pretending she wasn’t there for one reason. “Why don’t you just get a Crown Apple on the rocks?” I suggested, making it easy for her. “Yes,” she said, her voice relieved. “That sounds perfect.” She had four of them. Then she ordered three shots of tequila. The night was just getting started.
And soon she was shit-faced. Plastered. I was on my standard vodka cranberry, being a good boy, just watching the shitshow unfold. The stories started coming out. Her dad, her stepdad she hated, the rehab, the crying, the needing a good guy, the not being able to keep one. She’d been in Arizona for three years, and in that time, she mentioned at least ten different men she’d been in “relationships” with, all of which ended in a blaze of drama.
Her face was a mess of bad decisions. Botoxed to hell, her lips swollen into a permanent duck-face. “They’re too big,” she admitted at one point. She had the breasts of a twenty-year-old, but the rest of her body was rough. Not just the skin, but rough. Her legs were skinny, the muscle tone all gone. She had that alcoholic’s belly, that soft, swollen look that’s either water or an oversized liver. Her arms were skinny too, no muscle, just a roadmap of bruises from all the vitamin IVs and blood tests she’d been getting from some Groupon deal. Self-help, one discount at a time.
She had ADHD, that was for sure. A squirrel, zipping from one story to another, always circling back to her brother, her dad, her mom, her ex-husband. A lonely kid syndrome, she called it. I believed her.
When the bar was closing, she leaned in close. “Would you like to kiss me?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. I put my lips against those ridiculous duck lips and tasted the stale, honest truth: she was a smoker.
She used to be a California girl, she told me. A tight body, addicted to the gym and cocaine. She ran a bar, was a manager. A sex symbol. Everyone wanted to fuck her, she repeatedly told me. It was a kind of power. She’d been with a lawyer, fifteen years her senior, a defense attorney who lived on the beach. She was a party girl. Cocaine was her energy.
Now, she was just a collection of symptoms. Allergic to surgical tape. A chain-smoker who drank beer in the morning. Loud, obnoxious, prone to anger. “Fuck you,” she’d say to no one in particular. “Fuck you, too, man.”
She got in the passenger side of her car. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Take me somewhere dark.”
I’d just dropped a hundred and twenty bucks on this train wreck. I figured I was owed something. I found an empty bank parking lot, let her take the lead. “I want to fuck you,” she said, point-blank. “Get a hotel room.”
In my head I was thinking hell no, I’m not dropping another hundred and twenty on this mess.
She started calling me out, questioning my manhood. “Look,” I said, “if you want to escape, you can come to my house.”
A thirty-minute drive later, after a long, rambling monologue of her greatest hits, I was starting to feel sad, like I was about to take advantage of a wounded animal. But she needed something, and I was there. It didn’t help that she couldn’t walk on her own as I took her into my house.
The sex was drunk and sloppy, like watching an old bull rider taking one last, pathetic dip into yesteryear. There was zero connection. It was a sad waste of youth. She had no children, no stretch marks, but all the signs of being used up and thrown away. Of course, I coached her into satisfying me twice before we went to bed and she passed out.
I lay there in the dark, a stranger in my own bed. And I had the thought: “Am I a pig, preying on the weak?” There was no morning loving for this one. I just scanned her naked body in the gray light of dawn and felt nothing but a quiet, hollow disgust.
When she woke up, she went for a cigarette. Then she asked for a cold beer. It wasn’t even five in the morning yet.
On the eighteen-minute drive back to her mom’s house, she had me stop at the Circle K. She came out with more Crown Apple, sucked them down right in front of me. “This will control the shakes,” she said.
“So,” I asked her, “do you start your sobriety all over again now?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
In all the time we spent together, she never asked me a single question about myself. She just needed an audience, an excuse to pay for her own slow, public suicide. The bill at the brewery was a hundred and twenty dollars. My dollars.
When I finally dropped her off, I told her to thank her mom for me, and to apologize for making her worry. The second I got home, I couldn’t take a shower long enough. I felt dirty. And it made me start to wonder, why the hell am I even in this game? Is it just a catch-and-release? Some kind of sick excitement I get out of watching the wreckage?
I don’t know. But it was a pathetic, saddening little window into a life that was already over.
And then, of course, she starts blowing up my phone, looking for a repeat performance. I had to block her. And I look back on it now, and I wonder, am I being judgmental? Am I the system, the establishment, looking down my nose at this broken thing? Yeah, she’s an alcoholic, but after hearing her story, why wouldn’t she be drinking? Is she supposed to just put a bow on it and skip around, pretending to be happy?
Everything she shared with me, it only had one direction: down. I agreed to meet her because I was drawn to the chaos she had to offer. And once she showed it to me, I pulled back. A wild mess. Something that gets you fired, gets you a DUI. Maybe I’m just old. Maybe I’m not crazy enough anymore.
I don’t want to be the kind of man who looks back and starts judging. But it was a shitshow. Maybe I haven’t hit my own rock bottom yet. Or maybe the point of hitting rock bottom is to bounce out of there as fast as you goddamn can.
That’s the only conclusion I can come to. I’m sorry I had to block her. Sorry I’ve lost my hero status, my desire to save people. But there are people in this world who are anchors, and there are people who are weights.
And that one, she was definitely going to weigh me down.
Best of luck to her. Thank you for the experience.
