I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road by Mishka Shubaly

Author:Mishka Shubaly [Shubaly, Mishka]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781610395595
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-03-08T07:00:00+00:00

The day before a December show with Rumanian Buck, a band I’d started with Aaron and Chen, my two most constant friends, I swung by the Christmas party at Pianos for “just one beer.” I progressed rapidly, from beer to shots of Jameson, to bumps of coke, to drinking late into the morning with the metal security gate pulled down, to a near-fistfight with a cab driver who refused to take me over the bridge into Brooklyn. I glanced at the clock in my room when I finally shuffled in. My “just one beer” had concluded at 11:55 the following morning, fourteen hours and over $120 later.

I woke up in the early afternoon, still drunk, unable to get back to sleep. I kept drinking. It was the only way I was going to make it through the show that night at Santo’s Party House.

I took one of those big twenty-milligram Adderalls once I got to the club. Just before we went on, I snorted the blow still in my jeans pocket from the night before. Remaining upright was a challenge if I stood in one place, but as long as I kept moving, I was okay.

The show was fine. It’s not like it was my first time playing fueled by chemicals alone. Chen’s guitar was too loud, but it covered up any changes I may have muffed.

Afterward, Chen threw me the keys to his van. He was wasted and going home with some girl. Fine, I was okay to drive. Or at least more okay than usual.

When I went outside to bum a cigarette, a girl with pale skin and pale blue-green eyes was leaning on a rail, drawing angrily on a Parliament. Her hair was bleached so white it was nearly gray, trailing down to the middle of her back like mist. She’d been at one of our other shows, chasing Aaron around, shitfaced. I’d stared at her tight jeans and thought, I deserve that girl.

She turned her eyes up at me when I walked outside.

“You’re hot,” she rasped.

“You’re hot,” I dumbly returned.

She blew out a lungful of smoke.

“You wanna go?” she said.

“Sure.”

She turned to a friend of mine, who was standing next to her.

“Is he a rapist?”

“He’s never raped me,” my buddy grinned.

That satisfied her. She threw down her cigarette, stamped it out, and looked at me expectantly.

“One sec,” I said. I walked back in the club, grabbed my jacket, and threw the keys to the van at Aaron. They hit him in the chest and fell to the floor.

“Tag. You’re it.”

He looked at me, then down at the keys on the floor.

“Aw, fuck, man, come on, I can’t—”

A moment later this girl and I were in a cab, headed back to my place. When I asked her name, she lifted her head from my crotch to answer, “Oksana.”

Oksana peeled her clothes off the minute we got into my apartment. She climbed up into my loft bed and laid there, full, firm breasts and a taut, muscular body.

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