content warning: description of suicide

It is night, Adi is smoking, like always. Bill in the back seat, me in the front. Adi picks us up after meetings. He’ll say he’s going to the meeting but usually finds a way to be late and miss it. Then, he’ll pick us up to get dinner afterwards. This is what he really wants in the first place.

He is always smoking. Bill is always bothered by this even though he does it with the windows rolled down. February in Chicago, doesn’t matter, windows down, smoking.

His windows are tinted dark, he leans way back. There’s never enough space to sit behind him.

“I don’t have time to be sitting there swiping on this bullshit all day long. I make decent money. I’m not a bridge troll. I just need somebody to give me some leads, set this shit up, wherever we’re going. If she can get me five of these dates, I figure I gotta be able to close one or two of ’em.”

Bill complains about the smoke again from the back seat. He has longish hair, shoulder length, is thin with slightly effeminate features. Often people mistake him for gay even though he gets more ass than anyone I’ve ever met. It’ll be like fucking Tuesday night and he’s having a threesome with twenty- year-olds. It boggles the mind.

Anyways, Adi doesn’t even pause his sentence, just rolls the window the rest of the way down and keeps smoking. “Of course, it figures, I get the Jewish one.”

Apparently, in her questionnaire about “what he was looking for in a potential match,” Adi said, “I’m looking for like . . . you know, what the signs used to say on the water fountains . . . WHITES ONLY!”

“I think you’d be surprised, if you were a little more open, what can happen,” the matchmaker countered. She was offended but tried to shift the conversation by showing him some lovely Indian ladies. He conceded that they were more attractive than he thought they would be but held his ground. “It’s my money. Find me who I want. That’s why I’m paying you.”

“I’m not sure if this is going to be a good fit, Adi,” is the response he relays to us.

Adi is Indian, “dot, not feather” (his words), dark black beard, loves to make terrorist jokes, has glasses, but is not remotely nerdy, smooth baritone voice. He loves cars, can identify make and model by the sound of the engine or the position of the moon or some shit like that.

“Then she wanted me to shave my beard! I’m not shaving my beard. Have you ever seen me without my beard? I’ll look like a confused toddler!” he muses. She began to balk at the contract for the stated number of dates, doesn’t know if she can find them, since his desires are so specific. Adi admits he’ll have to look elsewhere but is happy to get out of the contract.

Bill is positively whiny by this point. We haven’t eaten and he feels that he’s getting smoked out in the back seat. Bill doesn’t need a matchmaker. He sets the age ranges on his Tinder profile from 18-60. He’s banged quite a few on either end of that spectrum, no joke. He’ll swipe right without looking until he’s used up his swipes for the day and sort through them later.

Me, I don’t know. I laugh so hard when I’m around Adi it’s like it doesn’t even matter how lonely I am. I feel normal when I’m around him. The three of us can make a whole evening out of creating frozen gummy bear love triangles until they kick us out of the frozen yogurt shop.

Adi will tell you anything when he’s good and ready. But he’s never good and ready. Once, he told me what happened. Once, and then he never mentioned it again.

“She had us help her. Did I ever tell you that?” I shake my head, no. “Me and my sister. We both knew. She made us promise not to tell Dad. So we didn’t tell him. He found her, and then we knew it was real.”

“That’s fucked up,” I offer after a silence of a thousand seconds or so.

“We never talked about it with each other. My sister and me. Isn’t that weird?”

I nod.

“My therapist thought it was weird, too!” he chuckles. “She’s really earning her check with me!”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” I added.

“My mom used to have parties all the time. She was very sociable. After . . . no more parties. Dad . . . well, you know.” He smiles abruptly. “You should have seen the look on her face when I told her that today.” He shifts the car back into gear. My center of gravity shifts and I can feel in the acceleration of the car a gate in his mind closing down.

“Did I ever tell you about the cars I totaled out on the track?” I shake my head no, even though the answer is yes, because I like to hear him tell it. He begins to catalog the cars, reciting the various capabilities of each mangled chariot and I close my eyes and let the sound wash over me. But of the trauma of growing up without a mother afterward, and a heartbroken dad, well it is not to be mentioned again until he is in a blackout so deep he can describe colors she was wearing that day like a kindergartner hallucinating about the 64-crayon box set on his first day of school.

Anyways, we get to the diner on Belmont. We’re meeting up with a newcomer. Kids got, I don’t know, four minutes sober? Thirty days maybe? Breakfast all day type of place. It’s the same crap on these in every diner: two eggs, two bacons, two pancakes, two slices of something, two fucking seconds of miserable cooking on a beat-up grill. The coffee at this place is garbage. The absolute worst in the city. It took me years, but I finally swore off of it.

All kinds of people asked me about Adi after he died. How? Why?

I’m sorry, but anyone who was surprised by his death didn’t know him. He had been talking about it for years. He even told us exactly how he was going to do it the week before it happened!

I mean, we didn’t just stand idly by. He told us when he was in the hospital. There he was cracking up all the nurses, he was in his best form. Pale, blue-eyed nurses laughing at his jokes and taking care of him. It was a little slice of heaven in the midst of a hell cake. He told us that he was going to jump off a parking garage. He had the place in mind. So that’s what he did. Jumped off the roof of the Northwestern parking garage the day he was supposed to be there for one of his therapy appointments.

He had that humor that burns, that Farley humor, that Williams humor, where you can only be that funny if you have to be . . . if to be anything less than that is just to die completely. The kind of humor that can only be made in a shame factory that works around the clock, three shifts a day, 24/8.

At the diner, we are tired, all of a sudden, somehow. We transition to talking about me moving out of my apartment. Adi is complaining that his car smelled like shit for months afterward from my boxes that he carried in his trunk. “I still smell it if I open my trunk and put my nose all the way in. It won’t go away!”

This was its own adventure. I was looking at pulling an all-nighter just to get the remaining items out and to a dumpster. Adi had agreed to come over and help me out even though his car wouldn’t hold much.

His car was a silver Audi that he absolutely loved. It was not remotely new, but still a sleek custom job that was his pride and joy. It was not, however, ideally suited for hauling boxes, as low slung as he had it.

Adi and I were in my emptyish apartment and we started to hear a gurgling sound. Well, Adi heard it first, and I ignored it, as I was frantically taping boxes. There was a thunderstorm that night, but it came up suddenly. We’d been moving things out to the car earlier without any issue, when suddenly the sky opened and Adi ducked beneath the awning with his still-lit, long-lasting, all-natural tobacco, American Spirits.

The gurgling noise got louder, all of a sudden brown water started shooting out of the tap. Larger and larger jets of vaguely brownish shit water. Then, from out the toilet, arcs of water shooting out like a Jackson Pollock arm toward the pristine canvas which was my very recently cleaned white bathroom tile floor.

I tried closing the lid of the toilet, confused about how long this would last. Unsure where to bail water to. We were laughing, but the brown shit water kept ejaculating out in uneven strips. It became apparent it was not going to stop. I went to the door of my apartment and saw my neighbor, the gamer with allergies, was having the same issue. We didn’t even live on the ground floor, which is what makes it so weird. The walls were so thin there you could say God bless you back to people sneezing in the unit next door. There is a reason this happened the day of me moving out I figure. It is a sign from the great maker and unmaker in the sky. It is time for me to move on.

Adi and I grabbed the boxes that had already been packed. There were several shelves of books that I had considered getting rid of. The decision was mercifully made for me now that they were coated in a fine mist of shit-water.

Adi grinned at me. “Problem solved!” He had been itching to have a cigarette anyways and now was free to do so. I stopped him before because I didn’t want the place to smell like smoke on move-out and get fined.

There were other stops along the way. We had him committed to the hospital involuntarily one time. They can only keep you for forty-eight hours, or maybe it’s seventy-two, but it was a desperate shot, and all we had left because we couldn’t get him to stop drinking again and go back on his meds. I remember walking out to the car with him barefoot in the snow. After we had him committed for the hospital stay, they got him on some new meds, but ultimately he didn’t stay on those either.

He became suicidal again around the time of disclosing to people that he might be gay. We didn’t judge him for it outwardly, he had shame to spare, so it wouldn’t have been fair.

But it did make me uncomfortable. All this time we had hung out, talking about girls, that kind of shit, what the fuck was that? Was that all a facade too? I mean, there was a time when I was his best friend in the entire world. Were we so close, was there such intimacy because of an unnamed, unspeakable love?

Maybe I should have been flattered, but it just made me start to question everything. I didn’t withdraw from him, kept reaching out. We said it was fine. Lots of people were gay or bi . . . it shouldn’t matter.

But it got harder to take his drunken calls. He could only be fully honest when he was drunk, and then retained nothing of what was said when he returned to sobriety. Like a video game resetting to the beginning of the level, we would have these great conversations, these insights, and then, you know, later none of it had ever been said and you were the one left feeling crazy.

I grieved and mourned for Adi while he was still alive. By the time he actually did it, it was a relief. In the aftermath, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. I felt like I was replaying emotion for other people. It was a performance. I went a couple years without thinking of him at all. But lately, bits and pieces of him have been floating back to me like the body parts an amateur serial killer might bury in a river, turning up one by one downstream after a hard rain. Not only when I hear someone say, “Just the tip,” but other moments when I have a joke I think no one normal will like, I smile and think of him.

After he died, other people had to do their mourning, but I really felt like he was at peace, like he didn’t have to struggle anymore, all that trite shit that people say but nobody ever wants to hear. It was all true. I had all the edgy angst around his death that would befit the well-meaning but insensitive aunt in a hallmark movie. I couldn’t be bothered with people having feelings about it. I grew tired of the re-enactment of the suicide saga with emotion, and started giving people the facts about it right away, before they even asked. All they wanted was gossip. Or not, maybe they were mourning. I don’t fucking know. All’s I know is, I didn’t care that they were mourning, and I definitely didn’t want to hear their ex-post-facto feelings.

The guys in the program set up a memorial service for him, his sponsor and some others. They thought I should speak since we were so close. It was in the fellowship hall of a church, a place that had meetings on Fridays at seven. There were more people there than I expected. It irked me to see all these tagalongs. What the fuck was this, a goddamn Sunday afternoon potluck? Maybe I wanted a monopoly on his suffering. A friend of ours played a song by Band of Horses and said a few words.

It was 1950s library quiet as the tinny sound blared out through his phone speaker from the podium, “. . . oooooo aaaand every occasion, I’llll be readyyy for the fuuneral.” Then it was my turn. It was mostly guys, and maybe for that reason, I remember this pregnant lady near the front. I felt bad for her, being dragged here like that, but I knew what I had to do and there was no point going halfway.

Adi had made me promise one night that I would tell a dead baby joke at his funeral if he died first. It was a test. See, if you weren’t laughing you didn’t really know Adi. Somebody had made you go. Anybody who knew Adi would know that if you didn’t find a dead baby joke at a funeral absolutely fucking hilarious, you didn’t belong at Adi’s funeral. So I looked right at her as I told it, you know, hurt people hurt people and all that shite.

Well, do you want to hear the joke or not?

“How do you unload a truck full of dead babies?

With a pitchfork!”

No? That’s okay, that’s okay, no hard feelings.

The un-easiest sort of laughter you can imagine permeated the room, slow as cancer and contagious as doing the wave at a sporting event. I didn’t smile, just glared at them. Adi would have been proud of the delivery. Other haunting details will drift back to me. It doesn’t matter what they are, that’s for me and not for you to remember. Still, I want to say something moving and complete here, a final epitaph of memory that will encapsulate all that he was to me, or to anyone else, but all I am left with is a vision of his profile in the streetlight with cigarette smoke wisping away from his beard and the sounds of his smooth baritone voice, pressing me,

“Promise me something . . .”

Nathan Cover is a teacher, traveler and (over)thinker who grew up in Texas. He lives and works in the city of Chicago. “American Spirits” is his first published piece.

SPOT IMAGE CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA

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