The Loss of Leon Meed. Josh Emmons
prince put on earth to fuck and run. Booze is the long-term proposition. Booze sets up residence in you and in return it gets rid of the pain but that’s no fair trade, because the pain isn’t gone it’s just hiding, and while you’re in that limbo and your nerve endings don’t mean nothing, while nothing means nothing, your pain’s developing immunities so that when it comes back it’ll reintroduce itself and there ain’t no movie this scary so that you’re begging for mercy and it’s you down on your knees penitent, and you didn’t mean to let the pain get so big, honest, you were going to bring it back and work with it a little, treat it with respect and figure out what it’s got to teach you. But by then it’s too late. I’m saying, by then the clock’s run out and you can’t ever make a move on your own again. You’re its slave forever on a plantation as big as your mind.
But Prentiss didn’t say this. Instead he ran a black hand over his black face and turned to the kid and walked toward him and said, as gently as he could, “That’s not a good idea for either one of us.” The brightness of aisle 11 was practically blinding, and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafted out of the ceiling speakers, all dulcet tones and why-not-pick-up-some-extra-gum. The kid backed into and overturned a basket of limes and belligerently kicked one of the rolling green citruses and shuffled down the aisle and turned left and wasn’t overcome with the shakes. Prentiss longed to follow him.
This Monday was another gray day, and a cement truck at the corner of Fourteenth and C Streets was grinding the devil’s own bones. They should be handing out earplugs. Prentiss walked by it on his way back from A.J.’s Market, coughing the rising dust and wiggling his right big toe through a sock hole as he passed an old bird-looking dude he saw hanging around sometimes, not doing anything.
Prentiss was expected at the library in an hour and hadn’t taken a shower or had breakfast or done his stepping. The stepping was hard. Pulling an apple pie out of its crinkle wrapping as he entered the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Carl Frost, he took a bite and stared at the fresh copy of Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members sitting on the coffee table. He had no trouble with the first step: “We admit we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.” Wasn’t his totaled car, revoked driver’s license, broken collarbone, and $61,000 worth of structural damage to the Fortuna Doll Emporium building proof enough? And the job firings and estranged girlfriends and chronic fatigue? Damn straight, his life had become unmanageable because of alcohol. As plain as an overhead B-52. But the second step was turning out to be a real barrier in his path toward recovery: “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Now, who in their right mind is going to hand over the steering wheel toward recovery to some Power that might not exist? That was just irresponsible. Prentiss had gotten himself into alcoholism, and Prentiss was going to get himself out. Simple as that. And it was this same “Power” that had allowed every tragedy he could think of to happen, from slavery to the World Trade. Prentiss was supposed to trust his recovery to that? What’s the expression, you must be kidding.
“Prentiss, that you?” called out a voice from the bathroom.
“Me.”
“Could you do me a favor and bring me some paper towels?”
“We out of toilet paper?”
“Looks that way.”
“I wish I’d have known; I was just at A.J.’s.”
Prentiss stuffed the rest of the apple pie in his mouth and took a roll of paper towels to his roommate in the bathroom. “That’s a potent odor,” he said. “Makes my fruit pie taste bad.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, you got a problem there.”
“Mayday, mayday.”
“You owe me money.”
“I always owe you money.”
“You got to put it up front now or they’ll shut down the utilities.”
“We have flashlights.”
“The second due date is coming.”
“We can make fires in the garbage can.”
“Going to turn off the water and we won’t be able to flush your evil shit away.”
“I’ll build an outhouse.”
“Seventy-four dollars, Frost. Today. Seventy-four dollars.”
“But I have to pay Sadie when I see her tomorrow.”
“Who’s Sadie?”
“My therapist.”
“A man’s got to have priorities. Don’t make me look for a new roommate.”
Prentiss went to his room and got out one of his work sweaters, a downy V neck decorated with rows of off-center maple leaves. Pulled on the boots. Patted his two-inch Afro into an approximate square. Started walking across town to the clean, well-lit Humboldt County Library, where the books and movies kept piling up for his sorting pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, right. About as much pleasure as having your balls licked by a cat. A frazzle-haired woman pushing a stroller with no baby in it breezed past him when he crossed the street to the courthouse. He was going to be late. But for seven bucks an hour, did he care? True, the county had given him the job as an alternative to living in a halfway house, and he had to be grateful for the little bit of freedom this allowed him, though it was a chafed freedom, a liberty restricted to fighting his impulse to sit down with a gallon of red wine and let the good times roll. Oh, but it was all sour grapes these days.
Prentiss had been living with Frost for two years and considered him his only close sober friend, though they didn’t do much together besides watch TV and go to the flea market for the distinctive clothes Frost favored. Prentiss didn’t pretend to understand Frost, who in high school had chastised him for not being black enough—the irony of Frost’s being white didn’t seem to matter—but who lately had let slip a few race-is-irrelevant comments regarding affirmative action. Sometimes Prentiss stood in Frost’s room, which had a map theme going on—every square inch of wall space was covered by maps of the world, of Uganda and Estonia and East Timor, of small towns and big towns and mountain ranges and highway grids and famous buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, the Carter House)—for an effect that was like staring at someone’s brain circuitry. His own, maybe. There were stacks of National Geographic on the floor and piles of loud, colorful clothing on the bed and in the room’s corners, as well as newspaper clippings about car accidents. Prentiss would wonder at this cartographic nerve center and then gratefully return to his own, normal room.
The next morning he got up early to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so he poured himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen and was examining the toy mouse that came in the cereal package, when a strange woman walked in and let out a half-second scream.
Prentiss threw down the mouse and tried to see straight. “You a friend of Frost’s?”
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“Carl’s. You a friend? My name’s Prentiss. I was just settling down to some breakfast cereal and found this little Ziegfried the Marvelous Mouse toy come in the package.” He looked from her to the table. Frost never had women stay the night. As far as he knew, Frost didn’t know any women. “It isn’t a regular thing me examining a plastic mouse this early.”
“My name’s Justine. I just met—I mean, yes, I’m a friend of Carl’s. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He looked at her and she stood there zipping her purse open and shut. “You want some toasted wheat biscuits?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”
“It’s back there in the hallway on your left. But at the moment we’re having a toilet paper shortage. I could offer you a paper towel.”
“That’s all right. I don’t live far from