Hatch chatters his teeth from beneath an old blanket. He points at the coffee table. “What the hell is that?”
A white-gold 1.85-carat princess-cut diamond ring sits on the table. I must have taken it out last night when I was drunk. Like an idiot, I passed out and left the case open.
“Family heirloom,” I say. “My mom’s wedding ring.”
“And what the fuck are you doing with it?”
“Debbie gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“Why not? Just shut up and drink this.” I hand Hatch a plastic bottle of orange Pedialyte that I procured from Dr. Burke’s pediatric office. Short of running an actual saline IV, it’s the best cure for dehydration or a hangover.
Hatch unscrews the cap, sips the bottle reluctantly. He gasps, licking his teeth. “That shit tastes awful.”
“Serves you right.”
Hatch and I both took our own sweet time at IU, graduating in five-and-half-years. We continued to be roommates even after moving up to Indianapolis from Bloomington. Our house is an American Foursquare tucked into a row of American Foursquares in Indy’s SoBro neighborhood—as in “Southern Broad Ripple,” not “South Bronx,” although our house sits in the middle of a weird Gotham nexus. I can throw a rock from my front porch and hit the neon marquee of Red Key Tavern, Kurt Vonnegut’s old watering hole. Wander a few blocks north, and I’m standing in the parking lot of Atlas Supermarket, where David Letterman bagged groceries as a teenager.
“M-moving a little fast, aren’t we, F-Fitzy?”
Hatch is sick. He’s feverish and severely dehydrated but refuses to go to the doctor. He’s shivering even though he’s running a one-hundred-and-three–degree temperature. He’s running a temperature because he has food poisoning. Yesterday during a Patrick Swayze marathon—Red Dawn, Next of Kin, Point Break, and of course the one hundred fourteen minutes of cinematic perfection that is Road House—we each drank five forties of Crazy Horse malt liquor. I passed out and pissed myself. Hatch got the munchies, mistook a half-pound of raw bacon in the fridge for lunchmeat, and made himself a sandwich. He’s been shitting blood for the past hour, insisting he’s turned the corner, but the truth is his dad kicked him off his health insurance last week.
“Fast?” I cover my mouth with a closed fist, swallow down a burp. I raise my thumb and then the rest of my fingers in sequence, counting to myself. Beth and I hit a year last July, five months to December, and then four more after that. By my count, we’ve been together for—”
“Two years,” Hatch says. “Has it been that long?”
“Twenty-one months actually.”
I’m still drunk. About half of Road House sits unwatched on the laser disc player I appropriated from Dad’s office right before Mom sold the dealership. Hatch has managed to appropriate my dead father as his own excuse to blow off life and drink himself into oblivion. After he downed his third forty of Crazy Horse last night, Hatch confessed he couldn’t recall the last day he hadn’t been drunk. Over the last year, he’s held multiple jobs. Just out of school, he worked the early morning shift at an indoor playground on Indy’s northeast side called Leaps & Bounds. His responsibilities included dusting the entire four-story jungle gym, washing the balls in the ball pit, waxing the floors, and smoking blunts with a gangbanger who was there on a work-release program. When a Pizzeria Uno opened next door the same week his Leaps & Bounds co-worker got thrown back in jail for failing a drug test, Hatch quit Leaps & Bounds to become a waiter, sobered up for almost three months before they offered him a management position, then proceeded to get fired after every bottle of Chianti in the Uno’s bar somehow ended up at a Delta Gamma sorority party at Butler University. Hatch tried the waiter thing again at the Beef & Boards dinner theater on the north side of Indy, worked there just long enough to meet B.B. King, then quit the day after he touched Lucille.
I just convinced Dr. Burke to hire Hatch to paint the interior of his house, which should keep him busy through the spring and part of the summer. At present, Hatch’s monthly contribution to our rent check is somewhere between ten dollars and a half-dozen late-night burritos. He disputes this number by claiming he makes up the difference by paying for most of our booze, a dubious claim seeing as (a) he drinks most of our booze, and (b) nearly all the liquor we still have in our house is the remaining contraband from Uno.
Fortunately, about a month after we moved in here, I answered an open advertisement to IU grads for “Eager and Earnest Hoosiers with English Degrees.” I got on the ground floor of a start-up independent publisher all of five blocks from my house called College Avenue Press. My title is assistant editorial director. My gross income is twenty-two thousand dollars.
Hatch’s affinity for the sauce has nothing to do with me or my dad. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Hatch is a drunk hanging from a fucking sequoia of alcoholics—his father, his mom, his grandfather. Since I started dating Beth, I feel like I’ve turned a corner. Hatch still seems stuck in the straightaway.
“Beth is the best thing that’s happened to me, probably ever,” I say. “But who says I’m ever going to give this ring to her?”
“Keep telling yourself that.” Hatch sits up, rewraps himself in the old blanket. “You know what your problem is, Fitzy?”
“Enlighten me.”
“For as much as you’ve fucked around, you’ll always be in love with being in love. You’re a man whore who deep down wants the fairy tale.”
“Says the King of the Narrated Mix Tape.”
“Oh, fuck the fuck off, Fitzy.”
“Can’t you just be happy for me, Hatch?”
“I don’t know. You gonna hold that mix tape thing over me forever?”
I nod. “You bet your ass. What are friends for?”
Hatch smiles, but I think it’s probably the food poisoning doing the talking. He grabs a cup off the coffee table that has a swallow of malt liquor left in it. And the bastard fucking drinks it! He reaches in between the couch cushions and pulls out an unopened forty of Crazy Horse. “Qualms, motherfucker,” he says.
Qualms is another one of Hatch’s stupid drinking games, Qualms being the code word for “finish your entire fucking drink.” Even sick, Hatch can find time for a drinking game. Originally intended as a power-drinking variant of the more universal “Social!” toast that allows for the occasional harmless chug with a friend, Hatch has turned Qualms into a weapon, a way to pummel people into inebriated comas. See, the loophole in Qualms is that you simply must finish your current drink in hand. So Hatch drinks down his drink—in this example, a solitary swallow of cheap malt liquor. Meanwhile, he hands you a fresh drink—in this example, an unopened forty-ounce bottle of cheap malt liquor—and proceeds to immediately yell, “Qualms!” Then, while casually burping up a mere drop of backwash, he sits back and waits to see if the foam first comes shooting out your mouth or your nose.
This time, it’s my nose. My stomach is okay, though. Money being as tight as it is, the only thing I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours is a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a large Diet Coke, both purchased with my mom’s Unocal 76 gas card. Forty ounces is surprisingly easy to keep down on an empty stomach.
I wipe traces of malt liquor off my mouth. “You really are a fucking dickhead.”
Hatch is laughing. “Just trying to lighten the mood, Fitzy.”
“Consider it lightened,” I say. The ring is still sitting in its open case on the coffee table. I grab the case and take one last look at the ring.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
I close the case, stuff the ring in my pocket. “This feels like the one, Hatch. It’s the first relationship I can see me being in for the long term.”
“The long term? When I said you’d been together two years, you immediately corrected me and said twenty-one months.”
“So?”
“So? You’re still programmed to celebrate month anniversaries. You’re like a new parent, holding on to those month-to-month milestones with numbered onesies that go all the way up to thirty-six because deep-down you just can’t wrap your brain around being a huge part of this little creature’s world basically forever.”
“That’s ridiculous. Who ever heard of a thirty-six month onesie?”
“Don’t be a smartass, Fitzy. My point is your heart is ignoring the hard-wiring in your dick. And I do mean hard-wiring. Twenty-one months might as well be twenty-one days. You’re not fucking ready.”
“Six years, Hatch.”
“What?”
“There’s your number. Beth and I have been on-again, off-again friends for six years. That’s a long time to get to know someone.”
“Just like you were on-again, off-again fucking Laura for most of the eighties?”
“I dated Laura in high school and then accidentally had sex with her one time in college.”
“Oh, you accidentally tripped and fell into her vagina?” Hatch snaps his fingers. “God, I hate it when that happens.”
“Don’t go there, Hatch.”
“Don’t go where?”
“I’m pretty sure Laura had it coming.”
“How do you figure?” Hatch asks.
First the new parent analogy and now an earnest question. I have to hand it to the guy; he’s being more attentive than he’s usually capable of being even when he’s not hungover.
“Never mind,” I say, catching myself. No one save Laura and my mother know my secret. The faked abortion. The chain of lies. The brother who turned out to be my son.
Hatch’s ADHD finally bails me out: “You ever find out what happened to The Tool?”
After we started dating, Beth and I agreed to keep things non-exclusive when she went back to the University of Illinois in the fall of ‘93. She told me she wanted to take things slow. What she didn’t tell me was her summer fling, “The Tool,” quit his bartending job in Empire Ridge and followed her to Champaign. He lived in her house until Thanksgiving. Beth said she felt sorry for him and that he slept on the couch. I didn’t believe her. Although by Christmas of that year we started dating exclusively, I know that tanned, white-teethed, square-jawed smile that used to stare at me from a picture frame on Beth’s nightstand didn’t sleep on any goddamn couch. Any mention of The Tool still pisses me off, which is why Hatch is mentioning him.
“The Tool has been out of the picture for a while.”
“Define ‘out of the picture,’” Hatch says. “Does he still call her?”
“Don’t care.”
“He still live in Champaign?”
“Still don’t care.”
“Has he bought Beth a ring yet?”
I grab Hatch’s hand and try to shove the bottle of Pedialyte in his mouth. “Shut up and drink your Pedialyte, you fucking baby.”