At this point, he finally started coming to, distinguishing one day from another, becoming aware of the guys around him — mostly black and Mexican guys coming out of prison for some addiction-related crime, usually dealing, sometimes assault or burglary. There is one guy he really loves, a funny, crusty old white geezer named Bobby G. who just got out of prison after serving twenty-two years for a crack-fueled murder. He and Bobby play poker every night after dinner, for pennies, along with a hugely fat Mexican dude named Santi, a former dealer a few years older than Mateo, who calls his mother “sweetheart” over the phone, which everyone in the house gives him a hard time for.
The funny thing is, in many ways, Mateo is the happiest he’s ever been. He feels like he’s with the right people for the first time in his life. Cleaning up the kitchen one night with Bobby G., he asked, “So what were all those years locked up like?”
And Bobby G. just turned and looked at him — a pissed-off look, Mateo thought. “How old are you?” Bobby G. asked him.
“Nineteen.”
“You have no fucking idea how lucky you are not to be in prison,” Bobby G. said.
Mateo laughed. “This is fucking prison!”
“This is fucking nothing,” said Bobby G. “This is a fucking picnic. Look at me. I can barely walk, my joints are so fucked up. I’ll never get those twenty-two years back. Go in at forty, come out at sixty-two.”
Bobby G. dragged out the trash, leaving Mateo standing there in the kitchen with Wiz Khalifa on the radio.
Today, when Mateo and the other guys are in the minivan on the way to the acupuncture clinic, Mateo sees him again: the tagger working on his wall, the sidewall of a building fronting an abandoned lot. The tagger’s been working on this wall the past week, and Mateo’s never seen anything like it. His work is so beautiful, abstract, all pale greens and blues, none of the fat black outer lines of traditional Pop graffiti, and it almost looks like he’s rubbing it out, or wiping it away, as he paints, like he’s leaving behind ghost colors. Every few days, Mateo’s noticed, in various trips here and there in the group minivan, the tagger makes progress on it, just this short figure with a baseball cap and his back to the street, working away. Mateo’s started becoming obsessed with the wall, wondering at random hours of the day if the tagger is there, dying for when he’s no longer on restriction and can come and go freely from the house.
As the van drives away from the corner, Mateo suddenly feels the saddest pang he’s felt in a long time — and, remarkably, he can identify it. It’s that he hasn’t painted. With the exception of some doodling he’s done here and there in rehab and in the house to pass the time, he hasn’t made a thing in over a year now, since well before coming to L.A. Can he even remember the last canvas? Oh God, that’s right. It was that black impasto — the leaves, the sad, foreboding tumble of dead leaves in the corner of the canvas, exactly what that last fall in New York had felt like, chilly death creeping in.
When he gets back to the house, feeling light as air from the acupuncture session, there’s a message on the chalkboard for him to call Drew. He feels the usual mix of shame and heaviness that comes over him when he thinks about her or talks to her. And, of course, Drew is the link back to her — Millimom. He says the Serenity Prayer to himself — he can’t believe he actually does this now, but actually he finds himself doing it a lot, whenever he feels the least bit stressed over something — and he calls Drew.
“Are you doing okay, hon?” she asks.
“Yeah, I’m okay.” He still can’t believe Drew is so kind to him after what he did to her and Christian. “How are you?”
“We’re good. So—” She pauses. “You know, your mom’s just here till Monday. You think we could come see you Sunday? I don’t want to push, but I know you said you’d think about it a few days ago when you didn’t feel ready.”
Mateo knew this follow-up call was coming. And he isn’t sure how he can put Millimom off again, her having come all this way just for him to rebuff her.
“Sure,” he says. “You guys can come on Sunday.”
Oh, shit, he immediately thinks. He can already see it — Millimom’s stricken mask of pain. That’s all he basically can remember about her during his fucked-up last year in New York. He’d practically stopped coming home; she never knew where he was. And he was barely at Pratt anymore. He was going anywhere he could to cop and use, sometimes to freaky Hector’s, only a few blocks away from the Christodora; sometimes to the filthy holes of various “friends” in Williamsburg or Bushwick or Bed-Stuy; sometimes to shit-traps that passed as after-hours clubs. He avoided having to be face to face with Jared-dad and Millimom as much as he could. But once a week or so, he had to come home, for clothes or a shower or because he was so dopesick he just didn’t care, and always — always — it was her stricken face, the sadness and fear etched into her face until she looked like a hollow-eyed Munch phantom.
That was the period, he remembers, when he and Millimom had nothing to say to each other. There would just be his mumbles, her mutters, a flash of her face, crestfallen anew when she realized that, yes, he’d been out there yet again, then her retreating into her room. Behind the door, he could hear the murmurs between her and Jared-dad, trying to figure out what was to be done with him. Then came the sculpture-throwing finale and his last look at Millimom’s drained face before he got on the plane.
Mateo didn’t give a shit what Jared-dad thought of him. Mateo wasn’t a fool; he could always sense Jared’s fundamental equanimity about him, that Mateo would someday be eighteen and no longer Jared’s problem. Mateo knew that it was psychotic of him to have thrown the sculpture, that he’d done it in a jittery panic as he faced a new wave of dopesickness, but he also couldn’t help quietly reveling in the fact that he’d let Jared know exactly what he thought of his stupid, macho metal art. He knew that spite and revenge weren’t good for his sobriety, but he couldn’t let that go.
Yet Millimom — she wasn’t so easy to write off. The sick shame he felt when he knew that she’d heard about the whole EMT incident and jail and Carrie—
And then, oh God, Carrie! He’d sought her out that day, lured her in — he was so hungry to use and to take someone there with him. His AA sponsor told him he had to pray for her spirit but otherwise “put the Carrie self-hatred on the shelf”; he’d figure out down the line how to make amends to Carrie’s survivors and, in some spiritual way, to her, but it was too soon to deal with.
That’s about the only thought that keeps Mateo from blowing his brains out over the thought of Carrie, because basically he feels like he killed her.
It’s always hard for him to get his bearings when Carrie thoughts come up. And from Carrie back to Millimom — Jesus Christ. And now Millimom will be here on Sunday.
Two days later, his initial thirty-day probation period is up; he’s no longer housebound except for supervised group outings. He can come and go as he pleases when he doesn’t need to be in the house for chores or groups, and moreover he needs to leave the house to find a job; it’s mandated. So he’s leaving the house after his cereal at nine A.M., thinking he’ll catch the bus to Silver Lake, catch an NA meeting, then skulk back into Intelligentsia, the coffee shop, and see if they’ll take his skanky ass back. It’s just then that he passes the tagger, his back to Mateo across the empty lot, working on his exquisite, intricate, dreamlike flurry of pale blue and green tattered flags.