Hunter got me a job at the deli by his house on Dewey Street, and after work we would go to his place to barbecue or go to the bar at the end of the street, Faculty Lounge, to drink and play pool. His paranoia about the cops and the gang violence seemed to have subsided, and it was encouraging to see that he was genuinely happy to have me back in the city. The sincerity of his friendship was enough for me to feel like maybe returning to Charleston had been the right choice after all.
Back at the house, Bobby was as insufferable as always, but with Joe and Marv around he was easy to avoid and I rarely had to hang out with him alone. The four of us started making regular trips to the tennis courts by Colonial Lake, and to my surprise I was playing the best tennis of my life. In high school I had been captain of the tennis team, but I had become such a pothead by senior year that I went to every practice and match stoned out of my mind. The weed, unsurprisingly, never helped. It made me tentative and awkward, like I had to think of every swing in great detail before I hit the ball. I became useless on the court, and I smoked so constantly that it eventually seemed the weed wasn’t even at fault anymore— I had succeeded in unlearning any tennis ability I may have possessed.
The tennis thing was intimately intertwined with the guilt complex that had produced my panic disorder, so it seemed I could fix myself by going to these courts every day and trouncing my inexperienced roommates. Despite drinking vodka mixed drinks every time we played, I still treated every match, every game, and every point as if it were the U.S. Open, and I kept track in my head of how many matches I won in a row (it was 23 before I finally lost), as if this was an objective barometer for the progress I was making toward redemption.
There was a pleasant irony in the fact that each time we walked to the courts we walked past Nelson Hollings’ old apartment, the one I’d stayed in six years earlier on my first visit to Charleston, now known only as the “trap house.” I was a part of the city’s history in some obscure way, and now that I was back I was once again an actor in its future.
As I fell back into a comfortable routine— working at the deli, playing tennis with my roommates, and drinking every night with Hunter— my anxiety gradually subsided. I got back on Tinder and had some relative success (no humiliating failures at least), and I started smoking weed again in tiny amounts without having any panic attacks. I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or how I would accomplish it, but it seemed this effort to find myself or fix myself might, by baby steps at least, be paying off.
But at the same time that my own life was incrementally improving, someone else’s was approaching an irreversible nosedive. In those first few weeks that I knew him, Buddy kept to himself mostly. Joe, Marv, and Bobby had been avoiding him since before I moved in, and, as Buddy quickly began to detect the same energy from me, he stopped barging into my room to do cocaine, a habit which I failed to realize was his unconventional way of offering friendship. He had an obese girlfriend named Caroline, and whenever she was over they’d stay locked up in his room in the back of the house doing things I didn’t want to imagine. Before long, Buddy started to stay in his room even when Caroline wasn’t there. The only times he ventured out, that I can recall, were his frequent trips to the bathroom and refrigerator, and his daily pilgrimage to the living room to do cocaine on the couch. He never went to the third floor without a good reason, he never went to play tennis, and as far as I could tell he never left the house at all. If he needed food, he just ordered delivery or took someone else’s out of the refrigerator.
He became a frequent topic of conversation, all of us telling our latest Buddy sightings as if he were last of some bumbling but exotic species of animal. The commentary on this peculiar creature always came back to one rhetorical question, which shocked me the first time I heard it: “Can you believe he has a five year old daughter somewhere?” Buddy was a father to a daughter none of us had ever seen and never would. There were many things I didn’t know about Buddy until much later, and much more that I’ll never know. The Buddy that I saw was the tip of an iceberg made from the murkiest water imaginable. There were plenty of good things about him that I never got to see myself and couldn’t even imagine being true. Joe and Marv swore he had an angelic voice, that he used to be an opera singer and with one note he could bring a grown man to tears. Yet at the same time they also swore he had “the eyes of a man who has had a dick in his mouth,” that one look in his eyes and you could see the muddled shame of having sucked someone off at some point. Whether that was true or not was irrelevant, but all the same it was clear that there was much more going on with Buddy than I would ever know.
I saw so little of Buddy that I didn’t even know he had a job until the day they fired him, which was also the day he started doing Katharax. He had been working as a waiter at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. on South Market Street. From what I’m told, he started regularly coming in to work drunk or hungover, and costumers started to complain that he was forgetful and rude. Instead of firing him, the management moved him to bartender. As a bartender, Buddy started drinking on the job to the point of slurring his words, messing up orders, and, on at least one occasion, throwing up in the trashcan behind the bar. His manager was a friend of his and didn’t really want to fire him, so he pulled Buddy aside one day and gave him a stern talking to, telling him he needed to get help and that he’d lose his job if kept up this sort of behavior. Buddy told him to fuck off, then he skipped work the following day. And the day after that. The day after that, Buddy got a text message from his manager friend. The text said, “I’m sorry to say this but you’ve been fired. There was only so much I could do. Get some help, sober up, and I can help you get your job back when you’re ready.”
Buddy didn’t handle the news well. I knew something was wrong when I woke up to the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen, followed immediately by a howl of either pain or frustration. An hour later when I walked down the hallway to go to the bathroom, I saw Buddy standing in front of the open refrigerator, chugging with abandon directly from my carton of milk. He belched, wiped some of the milk from his beard, then looked over at me vacantly and grumbled, “Oh, hey,” his voice sounding, to my mind at least, distinctly like an impression of Buffalo Bob from the film Silence of the Lambs. I was about to tell him to use a cup next time he wanted to take some of my milk, but as I opened my mouth to speak I saw that there was blood all over his hand— the same hand that was clutching the carton— and his bare feet were surrounded by shards of glass. I decided not to say anything about the milk, and I decided to use the third floor bathroom instead of walking past him.
Fifteen minutes later I was smoking a cigarette on the third floor balcony and Buddy came staggering out and asked me if I could drive. It sounded like he was asking if I knew how to drive or was physically capable of driving, though it was obvious that he would follow up by asking me to drive somewhere, so I cut to the chase and said, “Yeah, where are you trying to go?”
He said, “Need to go to a friend’s place ’n pick somethin’ up, an if you cou’n’t tell I been drinkin’.”
I rarely ever say no to someone when they ask a favor of me, even when I have absolutely no desire to help them. I used to regularly turn people down when they'd ask me if I wanted to hang out or something like that, but with legitimate requests for help I always found myself saying yes, then regretting my spinelessness forever after. So, in keeping with this character flaw, I reluctantly said, “Okay, where's this place you’re trying to go to?”
TO BE CONTINUED
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