Usually if I go there my mother tries to make me feel guilty for being born, then gives me a twenty dollar bill.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, staring around the kitchen.
My mother sits on the other side of the table and says to me in Russian, “Your father is brooding.”
“Yeah?”
“He won’t tell me why. He just broods.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, he won’t talk to me. He goes to work and then comes home, makes himself a sandwich and immediately goes outside and does yard work.”
“The yard looks nice.”
“Do you think your father is brooding?”
“What?”
“Do you think your father is brooding?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“He won’t tell me.”
“You’ve been married for thirty years, your lives are like an assembly line producing boredom and shit.”
“Our lives are great. We are middle-class. Look at this house. We live in Vienna, not Youngstown. We are good solid Americans. We even have citizenship.”
“This place takes everything human about a human and turns it into a Subway Special.”
“We worked hard to get you to this country. You need to respect me and be thankful for all that I’ve done for you.”
“I remember being little and picking mushrooms in the forest. I liked that. We would all go out and dad showed me how to pick mushrooms, and we laughed.”
“We don’t pick mushrooms in America. Picking mushrooms is evil. In America we go to the store and buy mushrooms. That is why we left Russia, to buy mushrooms.”
“Yes, I remember, you bitched the whole time about picking the mushrooms.”
“You’re an ungrateful little bastard, you know. You, Sasha, and even Lizaveta!”
I look at her with rage and say, “Listen right now. Don’t you ever speak Lizaveta’s name again.”
She looks at me in silence, knowing I mean it.
I say, “I know how you treated Lizaveta, I saw it. I know you like to tell people that Lizaveta was schizophrenic and all kinds of other shit, but I know. I’ll die knowing.”
She sits in silence.
I go outside and put the letters in my car and walk over to my father. He’s feeding his rabbits. My father always has rabbits.
“Hello.”
He looks at me with no emotion and says, “Hello.”
“How are the bunnies today?”
“Fine.”
I realize talking to him is fruitless. He will always remain a person who lets his misery eat him. He knows, like many working men, that keeping one’s misery does not kill a man; starvation and heart attacks do.
I leave. I don’t even say goodbye.
It doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t care.
He has never expressed a hate for anything, not the Soviet Union or for America, but he hasn’t expressed love for anything either. All he has ever really done is work and brood.
I look at him from the car and see a sad automaton taking care of his rabbits. His only real happiness in life, two little rabbits that he pets and feeds every day. He has never shared memories of his childhood with his children, never spoken of any political beliefs, never cried, never really shown emotion at all except for a generalized brooding over something which he will not speak about. But there he is, a man feeding and petting rabbits.
14
I’m sitting here at Sweet Jenny’s.
Chang is beside me drinking rum and Coke.
Life has really become pointless.
We are drinking on a Monday.
How sad is that?
I look at Chang and say, “Chang, I believe these are my last days.”
Chang doesn’t even respond.
“Chang, everything is getting on my nerves. Even this chair I’m sitting on, it’s hurting my ass.”
Chang doesn’t look at me when he speaks. “You’re right. We should die.”
“I know.”
“Are we immature? Is this what thirteen-year-old emo kids talk about?”
“Emo kids are asses.”
“When is something good going to happen? Something good happens all the time to other people. Not to us. We are like in some no-man’s land where everything is dead and stupid and not remotely satisfying.”
“I gotta shit.”
I get up and walk to the bathroom.
I feel demoralized walking to the bathroom.
I feel like I should lie on the floor and die.
I get into the bathroom and sit down to shit.
I put my head in my hands.
There is no hope.
There isn’t even a newspaper to read in here.
And it stinks.
I let out a huge fart and plop a turd in the toilet.
The water splashes and hits my ass.
I hate when that happens.
I remove my hands from my face and look around the shitter.
There’s something in the corner of the shitter.
I pick it up and look at it.
It’s a pill bottle.
I open the bottle and look inside.
Holy fucking shit, it’s a bottle of Oxies.
Somebody must have dropped it.
I quickly wipe my ass because if I know anything about drug addicts, they are going to come looking for their shit, and I have no urge to give up this bottle of Oxies.
I don’t wash my hands. I hurry out of the bathroom and sit back down next to Chang.
I tap Chang’s shoulder.
“Yeah.”
I look around the room to see if anybody is looking and whisper to Chang, “I found a whole bottle of Oxies in the bathroom.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Yeah, look.”
I slip the bottle out of my pocket.
Chang looks at it and says, “Holy shit! Some drug addict is going to be pissed.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Chang looks serious and says, “We don’t do Oxies. What are we going to do with them?”
“Sell them, dumbass.”
“Oh, good idea. How much can we get?”
“There looks to be like eighty of them in here. That’s fifteen dollars a pill. That equals twelve-hundred dollars.”
“Money.”
“Yeah, money.”
“Who are we going to sell them to? We don’t have any friends.”
“To strippers. We know a bunch of strippers who love Oxies.”
“You’re right, we do.”
“We are badass gangsters now.”
“Yes, we are. Vasily and Chang, badass gangsters.”
“I’m thinking we could take the money and take a little vacation. We could go out west and meet some of our MySpace friends. How’s that sound?”
“Good.”
“I’ll be over around ten tomorrow and we’ll start selling them, cool?”
“My life is so awesome.”
A man with grey skin and acne throws open the door and rushes to the bathroom in a panic.
Chang and I laugh.
15
Chang and I pull into the Tally Hotel parking lot.
Nadia lives in 408.
“Nadia is a stupid cunt,” Chang says.
“I know, but we need to sell these pills and she’ll buy them.”
“Fine, let’s go.”
We go up the stairs to Nadia’s room.
Knock.
The door opens after two minutes.
Nadia, a young attractive woman with grey skin and acne, motions with her hand for us to come in.
Chang and I go in and sit on the bed.
Nadia sits on the other bed. She’s talking on the phone, saying, “Motherfucker, I don’t need you. Who the fuck you think I am. I’m Nadia. What the fuck. Those guys are here with the shit. I need the shit more than you. Who the fuck, what the fuck, I’m Nadia. I know that ain’t my real name. What the fuck? I gotta go. Go fuck yourself!”