By J. Michael Hays

You don’t want to go out this way.

My case manager was right. I don’t. It’s 5 a.m., and I still can’t get her words out of my head. I sink deeper into the chair that sits directly beneath Renzo’s bedroom. Even after her warning, the only thing I want to do is get high for the umpteenth time in this Godforsaken basement.

Tick and tock.

The front door opens and closes. I hear Renzo’s footsteps and cane on the hardwood floor above me: ba domp, ba domp, like tires on a concrete bridge, then stillness. After a deep breath and sigh, I stand; better go up and see what I can do for him. Two years here, and almost nothing I do satisfies him.

He’s leaning heavily against the couch with one hand, a pack of cigs in the other, giving me the once-over. Looking as though he’s going to fall, I grab the office chair, roll it into the living room, and lock it down. He leans into both me and the chair in one fell swoop. He seems to relax as I push him from the living room into the kitchen, up to the boomerang-pattern Formica table.

It is dark save for the light above the stove. I take the cafetera from its ring-stained home and wonder how many cups of coffee Renzo’s grandfather made with it before the Cuban Revolution. The handle is broken, the body stained. It is as weathered as his nicotine-stained fingers and has become as much a part of me as he has.

It took a full year before Renzo stopped looking over my shoulder to make sure I made his café cubano correctly, as if I might slip in something fake like Folgers Instant. His directions were exact: pour purified water into the bottom chamber, heap Lavazza espresso into the filter basket, and set the cafetera over a blue flame. At the first eruptions, pour a little coffee over the sugar and stir after every drop until it turns into caramel-colored espumita.

Together we drink, bitter and sweet, each cutting straight through the other. The glowing cherry of a Marlboro Red illuminates his canela face and disheveled hair, casting a Medusa silhouette against a wall painted in Cuban colors, blue and white.

He introduces himself as Renzo because the name José carries a Mexican connotation. I thought surely he chose an alias to protect his reputation as a university professor. Then again, every gay dealer and user around knows who he is, and no one has ever contacted his employer. It is the one respect granted him because he supports our tiny underground world in every way except selling the stuff. Besides, he tells me regularly that if anything ever happens, the university, with “one of the largest endowments in the country,” will take care of it. Whether he identifies himself as Renzo or José, he does not identify as an addict. He merely “dabbles” in crystal meth, often referring to it as his medicine.

Pfffff. Medicinal meth.

“The cigs are gonna kill you before the drugs do,” I tell him. “You can barely breathe.”

“Breathing is overrated. And I’ve done the math; I’m 64 with at least another ten good years.”

“The way you look and sound, I’d say you’ve got about another ten hours.” Ouch. Friendly fire.

Meth gives him energy and having it more readily available is probably the reason he let me move in when times got rough for me. But the price of staying rose from being his dealer to doubling as his invisible roommate, chef, and housekeeper every day except Thursday. That’s when the cleaning ladies come, and I am banished through the back door until he says the coast is clear.

Renzo gets angry, though, if I leave nothing for them to clean. He believes he is the primary supporter of the three housekeepers: a mother and her two daughters. So, Wednesday evenings, he has me mess up rooms on purpose. Even if they did see me coming and going, I doubt anything would come of it. One of the daughters humiliated herself by unwittingly eating a THC gummy bear, then vowed that the Virgin Mary told her to eat even more gummies because they were the body of Christ. Ever since, fasting while working has become their habit.

He’s been thinking about my “you’ve got about ten hours” comment and finally looks up to give a squinty stare. “That’s what I love about smoking,” he says. “Taking a drag off death.” He takes a long, steady pull, holds it in for a beat, and tilts his head back. With his mouth open wide, he releases a controlled gunmetal billow, like smoke rising from one of Titanic’s funnels, just before it slips into the sea.

“Do you want to know how I stopped smoking after twenty-six years?” I ask. He waves me off with a twist of his limp wrist. “I quit smoking and drinking thirteen years ago, both on the same day. Easy as pie. Guess how I did it.”

“You got some hillbilly in Bama to hypnotize you.”

“No, but I might should have tried that first… Crystal meth! The first time I tried it, I thought, ‘I’ll never drink or smoke again.’ And I didn’t. It was that good.”

He looks at me for a moment, and we burst out laughing. For a few seconds I see the boy in his face when he smiles.

Unless we are high, neither of us is fond of looking in the mirror. We prefer to see our meth-distorted reflections through men twenty and even thirty years our junior, but their perceived lack of substance, real or not, leaves us wanting.

We confuse the lowering of our inhibitions with the intellectual intimacy we crave. Like two drunks, we turn mundane concepts into philosophies that seem stupendous in the moment. Our most ridiculous (and embarrassing) theory yet: the homelier a man, the more likely he votes Republican; the better-looking, the more likely a Democrat. Vice versa for women. Referring to someone as Democrat or Republican has become our secret language.

We also enjoy watching old foreign movies, then discussing the political and religious undertones of their day. He introduced me to the anachronistic melodramas of Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s answer to John Waters. At Christmas we watched my favorite: Dark Habits, about a convent of nuns named Sister Shit, Sister Damned, and Sister Sewer Rat, collectively the order known as “The Humiliated Redeemers.”

But the film during which he watches my reaction most is Decree of Desire. We discuss its symbolism at length, yet he never mentions his published critique of it. Whatever humility he has as a teacher, he honed at Yale. He reminds me of his alma mater weekly. Fed up with his hubris, I once told him the only reason he was a Yalie was affirmative action. Expecting a lively discussion afterward, I was instead met with a wince, followed by a glassy thousand-yard stare.

As the sunlight emerges, the shadow snakes on the wall blur into one blue-gray mess. With a startling burst of energy, he says, “I know what I want for breakfast: pineapple, blueberries, and yogurt with a drizzle of honey. Royalty,” lifting his chin into the air.

I want to go downstairs and get high, but I’m hoping we find something to laugh about again, so I keep him talking. “Are you going to work on your book before the semester starts? You’re a year late.”

He is writing a book entitled The Sovereign Exile, which, in his words, “explores the politics of dissent and flight, from the old empires to the new.” Can’t he just say it’s about people who challenge their governments and try to run?

Pompous. Ass.

“And for lunch, I want a grilled cheese sandwich, THE WAY I TAUGHT YOU, not like your ‘mammy’ in Bama makes.” I tell him he knows I don’t like it when he’s too loud. He asks for the hundredth time, “Have you ever heard of a quiet Cuban?” It was funny the first couple of times he asked it, but hollering at me on a peaceful January morning is not.

Julia Child once taught him how to make a grilled cheese sandwich: mayonnaise instead of butter, two cheeses between thick sourdough, cooked until the outside hardens enough not to droop like a Dalí clock. For the life of me, I cannot make it the way she did. I want an A+. I want to hear, “Well done.”

“I bought a special cheese to use this time. It’s in the refrigerator,” he says.

What I want for lunch is chicken. He won’t have it in the house, though. The first time I put chicken thighs in the cart, he looks like he might be sick and makes me put them back. Later, he tells me that when he was five, his grandmother locked him in a walk-in freezer with hundreds of slaughtered chickens hanging around him. Everything he shows me of Cuba stopped mid-century: the cars, stranded by the embargo; the boy, frozen among his grandmother’s chickens.

I make the royal breakfast and set it in front of His Majesty, Emperor of the House of Class and Caste, Literature and Ill Repute.

“I know I’m a lot,” he says, takes a deep breath, and sighs. “You deserve a break. After breakfast, go downstairs and do your thing. Come up at noon. Maybe you can get the sandwich right this time.”

It is 8:30, which gives me a good three-plus hours if I can get him to bed.

I carefully push him and the office chair into the bedroom. He groans with an “Ayy” when we go over the threshold. He groans when attempting sleep, traveling up and down the stairs, and even more when using the bathroom. Sometimes, I think he is afraid of missing out on something and simply cannot allow himself to relax. He rarely sleeps more than twenty minutes before waking first with a gasp, followed by yet another moan.

Smoking meth would take away his pain, but he has not used since New Year’s Eve, eleven days ago, the longest stretch of sobriety I’ve seen. I decide to say nothing of it.

“You sure you don’t want to go to the bathroom before you lie down?”

“No. I’m good.”

“Go,” he says. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

“I’ll check on you at noon, le petit caporal.”

I descend the floating staircase into the basement and immediately sit in the same chair as before. I can see almost every inch of the basement from here, including the back door, which has become a thorn in my side. The first week I moved in, he stipulated one condition: only he enters and exits through the front door; I slip in and out through the back, like a third-class passenger.

I transfer the contents of the old syringe into the new one, my last clean needle, and create a tourniquet using the elastic from a jockstrap.

I hear his rhetorical “Ayy” coming from the room above me.

Da domp.

Silence.

Da domp. Da domp.

What the hell is he doing up?

He groans again, but this time from his bathroom.

Da domp… Da domp… Da domp.

Why didn’t he let me help him?

“Ayyyy ay ayyyyyy,” he moans as he falls into the bed.

I cannot figure out what he is doing. Between the moans and the rustling covers, it is hard to concentrate.

Goddammit, will he ever shut the fuck up so I can get high for a while?

Another “Ayy,” a muffled gurgle, more rustling covers.

Should I go upstairs? Fuck it. He will call me if he needs me, and he knows I am right below him.

I wait…

Jesus, I thought he would never get to sleep.

As I try it again, I remember the first time I tried to inject myself. Blood all over the bathroom walls. Two hours with the same dull needle. A decade later, my veins are so damaged, it takes me even longer.

The clock across the room ticks and tocks.

Eleven o’clock. The Republican next door will be out smoking his morning cig. I twist the rod on the blinds.

Open-peek, close. Open-peek, close.

This time I wrap the elastic around my bicep, hoping it will make a difference, but both hands begin to shake—the left, starved of oxygen; the right, because after all these years I am still afraid of needles.

12:45. Tick and tock.

Fuck. Fuck.

I promised him noon; I’m forty-five minutes late, again. Hell, he needed the sleep anyway.

I give up on trying to shoot up. Time to go make the perfect grilled cheese.

The next-to-last step of the stairs creaks as I stop, half-panicking that I didn’t grab the syringe. Comforted by the feel of it in my pajama pocket, I take the last step in stride.

As I round the corner into his bedroom, he is naked, facedown on his pillow, both forearms bent at his sides as though he has been trying to push himself up. The first thing I notice is shit coming out of his ass. I cannot understand why it has not rolled down his legs. His purple face is turned slightly toward me, and I can see only his right eye. A string of crusted saliva connects his mouth to the pillow. Under the bulging eye, a grayish streak runs from eyelid to beard, like dried tears.

No moans. No tick; no tock.

I touch his forearm, then his hand, both a little stiff. He is not cold, but the house is not cold either. I begin to look around the room as though there might be a sign as to what occurred. My eyes land on the gaps in the wooden floor, and I see the chair where I was sitting directly below.

All that time downstairs.

Then it comes, starting deep in my chest and tearing through my throat. The walls and floor vibrate with me. Dammit, Renzo, you were supposed to be around ten more years. I was coming up to make you a fucking grilled cheese, to get it right this time.

I wail again, shoulders folding in and out, my face hot and wet. Snot pulses from my nose.

He never sleeps naked, so I don’t understand his nakedness. For a while, this is the only problem my mind will engage: Where are his clothes?

I hear the neighbors climbing the stairs past his window. I go around the bed and quickly twist the rod until the blinds close completely. Don’t see him like this. Don’t see me like this.

It’s Thursday. I could go out the back and let the cleaning ladies find him. No one has to know I was here. As much as I covet the Rolexes on his dresser and the art glass he never lets me dust, I leave them where they sit. I take a step back toward the stairs. But I can’t leave him. Not like this.

I call 911. The operator wants me to check for a pulse, then start CPR.

I tell her no. I can’t bring myself to roll him over. He’s been dead for a while, so it’s too late for mouth-to-mouth. Plus, there is all that shit.

She tells me no one has ever told her no and to stay on the line until the ambulance arrives. I tell her ambulance only. Police are unnecessary.

That was stupid, but I cannot undial the number.

A policeman arrives first, the EMTs after. I must be stark raving mad because I think every living man in the house is a Democrat. Then, through the living room window, the three cleaning ladies blur into nuns. No gummies, no body of Christ, for Sister Thief today.

They must be early.

The officer asks me questions, but I have no time to rehearse. My voice shakes, and I wonder if I’m being too loud. I want to run.

Before the EMTs take him away, before I am given the chance to say goodbye, the officer escorts me through the front door. The cleaning ladies say nothing as I pass. I am foreign to them; all they know is I am leaving José’s house in handcuffs. Part of me wants to ask them to forgive me for the mess I made. Another part wants to tell them I didn’t kill him, that I loved him. Instead, I find myself wondering what they will think of me.

~~~

J. Michael Hays fell in love with words at six, the essay by twenty-one. A lifelong procrastinator, he finally makes his debut here at fifty-six. Working with kids on the spectrum is his vocation; pursuing a master’s in psychology, his labor; writing, his recreation. In Savannah, GA, he manages a home for wayward male souls in recovery and writes best just before the house wakes, when stillness elicits a sentence he can live with. He is gay and a pushover for black labs.