Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride by Sweany Brian;

Author:Sweany, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2016-03-30T21:45:34+00:00

PART II

1994–1995

Chapter fifty-four

Hatch chatters his teeth from beneath an old blanket. He points at the coffee table. “What the hell is that?”

A white-gold 1.85-carat princess-cut diamond ring sits on the table. I must have taken it out last night when I was drunk. Like an idiot, I passed out and left the case open.

“Family heirloom,” I say. “My mom’s wedding ring.”

“And what the fuck are you doing with it?”

“Debbie gave it to me.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Just shut up and drink this.” I hand Hatch a plastic bottle of orange Pedialyte that I procured from Dr. Burke’s pediatric office. Short of running an actual saline IV, it’s the best cure for dehydration or a hangover.

Hatch unscrews the cap, sips the bottle reluctantly. He gasps, licking his teeth. “That shit tastes awful.”

“Serves you right.”

Hatch and I both took our own sweet time at IU, graduating in five-and-half-years. We continued to be roommates even after moving up to Indianapolis from Bloomington. Our house is an American Foursquare tucked into a row of American Foursquares in Indy’s SoBro neighborhood—as in “Southern Broad Ripple,” not “South Bronx,” although our house sits in the middle of a weird Gotham nexus. I can throw a rock from my front porch and hit the neon marquee of Red Key Tavern, Kurt Vonnegut’s old watering hole. Wander a few blocks north, and I’m standing in the parking lot of Atlas Supermarket, where David Letterman bagged groceries as a teenager.

“M-moving a little fast, aren’t we, F-Fitzy?”

Hatch is sick. He’s feverish and severely dehydrated but refuses to go to the doctor. He’s shivering even though he’s running a one-hundred-and-three–degree temperature. He’s running a temperature because he has food poisoning. Yesterday during a Patrick Swayze marathon—Red Dawn, Next of Kin, Point Break, and of course the one hundred fourteen minutes of cinematic perfection that is Road House—we each drank five forties of Crazy Horse malt liquor. I passed out and pissed myself. Hatch got the munchies, mistook a half-pound of raw bacon in the fridge for lunchmeat, and made himself a sandwich. He’s been shitting blood for the past hour, insisting he’s turned the corner, but the truth is his dad kicked him off his health insurance last week.

“Fast?” I cover my mouth with a closed fist, swallow down a burp. I raise my thumb and then the rest of my fingers in sequence, counting to myself. Beth and I hit a year last July, five months to December, and then four more after that. By my count, we’ve been together for—”

“Two years,” Hatch says. “Has it been that long?”

“Twenty-one months actually.”

I’m still drunk. About half of Road House sits unwatched on the laser disc player I appropriated from Dad’s office right before Mom sold the dealership. Hatch has managed to appropriate my dead father as his own excuse to blow off life and drink himself into oblivion. After he downed his third forty of Crazy Horse last night, Hatch confessed he couldn’t recall the last day he hadn’t been drunk.

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