His mother says something nice about Dennis’s family. Kim tells Kenny to shut up.
The boys keep chattering — about school, Kenny’s sisters, who knows what — and Teddy listens to both of them, patiently, and laughs his quick rat-a-tat-tat laugh, which only eggs them both on.
Lisa plays with her food, and Sean is in the high chair.
From a distance it looks like any other family. From a distance, he looks like any other boy. Laughing with his friend. Talking about soccer. Dressed in cords and turtleneck like all the other boys his age. Even if you looked closely, you couldn’t see how he is a boy who prays at night not to wake up.
He says something, something now long forgotten, and his father finally speaks up and says, Oh, yeah, Willie, is that so? He challenges whatever was said, whether it be about soccer, Dennis, school, the moths flapping madly against the porch lights outside. It doesn’t seem so harsh, but he knows his father is just getting started. Still, he feels emboldened by the hour before in the kitchen — Uncle Teddy, Kenny — he feels in league with them and, so, safe. He talks about something else. It doesn’t matter what. His father then says something that no one else understands, but he does. Looks like you’ve got it all figured out, Willie, he taunts. Looks like you’re really on top of things. As his father speaks, he knows he’s gone too far and not to say another word. Have your act together, do you, Willie? The voice is all Boston, all Scotch. All your problems under control? Any problems you want to talk about? Or should I? How about that? By this point no one will be speaking or understanding what’s going on. But he understands. And he’s praying that his father will stop and that he won’t, not this time, finally start spilling what he knows, what he’ll always have over him. He wonders if he’s told Uncle Teddy, because Teddy’s looking at him oddly now. Is it pity or disgust? He can’t tell. His face grows hot in the tense air and finally Uncle Teddy starts to talk about Chris, his son, and how he’s in a play or on a team or building a tree house.
The dinner winds down, and the awkward patch is ignored and forgotten. His mother asks for help in the kitchen and complains about how her back is acting up again. Could be a slipped disk, she says and sighs. His father rolls his eyes, Kim rushes to scrub dishes at the sink, and he and Kenny carry a few bowls into the kitchen and take off upstairs.
At some point before sleep he heads to the bathroom, and it takes longer than usual. His mother knocks once, Kenny a few times; he runs the water, does the dance, makes the mess and cleans it all up. It’s done, but when he returns to his room, where Kenny is already asleep, it seems far from over.
Morning
I’ve been at the Gansevoort Hotel for almost two weeks. There have been other rooms, in other hotels. They are all near One Fifth — SoHo, the West Village, Chelsea — but feel worlds away, in neighborhoods I’ve never visited. I check in under names from childhood — Kenny Schweter, Michael Lloyd, Adam Grant-West — and explain that I’m in a fight with my girlfriend and am not looking to be found. No one ever blinks. They simply look at my passport, run the debit card, and hand me a key.
I’ve been at the Gansevoort the longest. I’ve stayed only a night or two, four tops, at the other places, 60 Thompson, the W, the Maritime, the Washington Square Hotel. These were after Newark, after the nights at Mark’s, and after New Canaan, Connecticut, where my friends Lili and Eliza checked me into Silver Hill, a rehab I immediately checked out of. After I scored from the driver who picked me up, he dropped me at a Courtyard Marriott hotel in Norwalk, where I stayed until the drugs ran out — romancing the prospect of dying a few miles down the road from the hospital where I was born.
I’ve changed rooms a few times at the Gansevoort and am now in a suite that the manager says, because I am staying at least a few weeks, he’s giving me for nearly half price. It didn’t just occur to him; when I changed rooms, I asked the person at reception what sort of extended-stay discount they could offer.
Every night I hear shouting from the street—Billy, keep it up. You better enjoy it while you can. You’re lucky you’ve lasted this long, Billy. There are vans parked along Gansevoort Street with metal boxes on their roofs that I’m convinced are surveillance vehicles. There are bland American sedans everywhere, and each one, I’m sure of it, is driven by a DEA agent or an undercover cop. Still, each night after midnight, I put on my black Arc’teryx jacket and black Parks & Recreation cap and shuffle out through the lobby and up to 14th Street to a cash machine at the corner bodega. The place has two of them, side by side, and only once am I able to run my card and key in the codes and amounts fast enough to get them to dispense more than the $1,000 limit. Usually I have to wait and get no more than five batches of $200. Night after night I do this and then load up on lighters. I wonder how many others like me the people behind the counter have seen. Hundreds? None?
I make my way back to the hotel, carrying whatever drugs and stems I have, because I’m terrified someone will raid the room while I’m gone. Twice I have dropped bags of crack in the lobby. My belt at this point has seven holes in it. It began with four. I’ve carved out one with a knife and two have come from leather shops that I’ve passed between hotels and cash machines. Still, my jeans are falling down around my hips.
I’m not alone in the room. Malcolm has been with me for four or five, maybe six, days. He turned up with Happy one night and jumped on board for the ride. He went to Dartmouth, he says. He’s black, lives in Harlem, is probably no more than thirty, and is beautiful. Doesn’t seem gay and can do enormous amounts of drugs without appearing shaky or anxious.
There is a night when I am convinced the room is about to swarm with cops and we race out of the hotel as if it’s on fire. We leave everything there — everything besides the drugs — and check into the W near Union Square. I pace the room like a madman, and Malcolm is patient and keeps fixing me glasses of vodka with ice and lime. He distracts me with stories about being on scholarship at Dartmouth and playing football. He dropped out a year ago but plans to return when he’s saved enough money or he can get a better break on tuition. He’s getting his real-estate license. When I ask, he says he knows Happy from the neighborhood, and when I remind him that Happy lives in Washington Heights, he says that he used to live there, too. Not much of his story seems to hold up but I don’t care. He’s gentle and sexy and being by myself right now would be unbearable. Being with him makes all the other nights that came before and the prospect of the ones to come seem unspeakably lonely. During some of those nights, I call numbers for escorts listed in the back pages of the Village Voice and New York magazine. None ever do drugs with me and most stay just exactly one hour. Their skin and their compassion — most at some point say I should slow down, that I might hurt myself — are never enough, never quite what I had in mind, and when they leave, I’m almost always relieved and disappointed.
The room at the W is small compared with the one at the Gansevoort. It’s cramped and the ventilation is worrisome since the smoke we make seems to just linger and not cycle through the vents. I’m terrified a fire alarm will go off as it once did at 60 Thompson. I think about checking into a third hotel, but I’m getting worried about money — there is twenty or so thousand left and I’ve already gone through more than twice that much — so it’s the Gansevoort or here.