An Old Friend Calls

  What am I doing here? I’ve been free of him for months. I should leave. Quickly before he shows up I’ll sneak out the back.

Fuck! Too late. Here comes Curtis, the Waiter, Jerry in tow. Curtis pulls out the chair across from me for Jerry.

I can still taste him on my lips, still, feel the warmth as he slid down my throat. I shouldn’t have come here. What the fuck was I thinking?

Goddam his smell is intoxicating.

“Can I get you anything else?” Curtis asks.

“Maybe… Maybe a coke…” I stammer. My eyes have not left Jerry’s unnaturally amber eyes since he came into view.

“Okay, I’ll be right back with that.”

I manage to make a sound I hope sounds something like an acknowledgment while I try to swallow the excess saliva pooling in my mouth.

Jerry has what I could only describe as the devil’s grin on his face, well aware of his effect on me.

“How have you been Charlie? It’s been what, six, seven months now? You look amazing.”

“I’ve… I’ve been good… I…. I…. I…. Why the fuck am I here?”

“What do you mean? You called and asked me to meet you here. Is everything okay?” he asks so softly I can almost believe he actually cares.

“No, It’s not fucking okay!!! I never called you??? Why the hell did you call me here?!?! Shit… It was a mistake for me to come here.” I almost yell, reaching into my wallet to throw a twenty on the table. I stand to leave but before I can take a single step Jerry has my hand.

“Charlie, please. Just give me 15 minutes.”

“Why the hell should I?” I spit at him.

“I heard from Eliza.” At that name, my knees buckle, and the wind is knocked out of me, taking a seat is all I can do to stop myself from hitting the floor.

“Here’s your Coke sir.” Curtis drops off my coke carrying a tray of drinks for the other patrons, “flag me down if there is anything else I can grab for you.”

Why would she get in contact with Jerry? What does she want? Why now? A million different questions race through my mind in the span of 10 seconds.

“Go fuck yourself!” I spit out, a bit louder than I meant to, the surrounding diners look towards our table in revulsion.

“Charlie, I know how we can win her back.”

Trying to compose myself so I don’t draw any more attention, I choose my next words very carefully.

“Understand this Jerry. There is no ‘we’ any longer. I let your toxicity seep into my life for far too long, and now that I've been free of you I’m not going to let you use promises of getting back together with Eliza to weasel your way back into my life. I know her life is better ever since she cleansed herself of me and by extension you. And her resolve gave me the strength to see there is a life for me without you. Why would I upset her by coming back into her life unnecessarily, or fuck up all that I’ve worked for by inviting your parasitic ass back into mine?”

He actually looks like my words hurt him a little. “You act like you didn’t love our time together Charlie. Like you don’t miss me every day. Like you wouldn’t still be with me if you could do so without worrying about anyone, or anything else.”

“That’s just It, when I’m with you I couldn’t possibly care less about the people in my life that I’m supposed to love and take care of. Hell, I’d argue that I don’t even care about myself. All that matters when we're together is you. And It doesn't matter who I have to hurt, rip off, alienate, terrify, lie to, steal from, gaslight, neglect, abuse, or kill. All I care about is appeasing you.”

“How many hundreds of dollars did I withdraw from Eliza’s account for you, because, in your words, ‘she’ll never notice.’? It’s kind of hard to ignore $10.87 disappearing from your account every single night for months at a time. Wouldn’t you agree? And how many months did I lay at home in bed with you while she worked her ass off to pay all our bills, while I lied to her daily about interviews and applications because you made me too sick to do anything or go anywhere unless it was for you. And when she finally broke down and got me a job herself, you had me use any excuse whatsoever to get out of going. Even going as far as throwing myself down some stairs to feign fainting. She always had to cover my shift on top of everything else she did for us.”

“On top of putting her through all of that, I had you constantly whispering in my ear that she was out there cheating on me, or messaging other guys, or that I was going to lose her because I’d never be enough to keep anyone happy. I still feel that shame and guilt from when I found the anonymous post she made on social media saying “I have no privacy because my boyfriend goes through my phone after I fall asleep every night.” And as much as I hated myself at that moment, I was never able to find the willpower to stop myself EVERY. FUCKING. NIGHT. for the entire year and a half we were together. She was my prisoner, constantly accused of disloyalty, for no reason, while I ran around behind her back with you.”

“I lied to myself by saying that I did it because I loved her and was scared to lose her, while in reality, your arm was so far up my ass, that I was your puppet, incapable of doing, saying, or feeling anything that you didn’t command of me.”

“How often did I grasp for excuses as to why I was coming home with black eyes, cigarette and lighter burns, knife wounds, and slit wrists? I ended up institutionalized multiple times because you convinced me to kill myself. I can’t even begin to fathom what kind of effect waiting for me to wake up from that coma had on my mother.”

“How long did I let you keep me anxious, depressed, paranoid, and suicidal with the daily poison you gave me, and by convincing me that A) I didn’t need medication and B) when I took them they weren’t working? The only one I was allowed to keep taking was the one that allowed us to be together.”

“Jerry! Are you even listening to me?” I’m enraged because he’s chuckling at what I've just said.

“Honestly? No. All I heard was ‘Wah, wah, wah, poor me…’ That’s your problem Charles. Nothing is ever your fault, and I'm just your latest scapegoat. You’re blaming me for everything that went wrong in your life this last year, but you did all of that to yourself, not me. You waited for Eliza to fall asleep each night, pushing her to go to bed because you had to run off with her bank card before 1AM. You stalked her, invaded her privacy, couldn’t bring yourself to trust her, and kept her a prisoner in the home she paid for. I was just trying to be there for you, and you went and made it into something more. I never laid a hand on you. I was the one trying to convince you to go see a therapist because I was helpless watching you hurt yourself in worse and worse ways as your depression progressed.”

“Now you have all these little friends to sit around with each night telling each other your stories, demonizing me. Blaming me for all your problems, but if you each took even a second to think about it, you’d realize that I was just trying to help you. It’s quite sad. You guys couldn’t handle life without me so now you try to turn anyone I care about against me. I don’t even know why I agreed to meet you here when you called.”

“I didn’t fucking call, you did!!!” I scream. Great, now people are staring at us and a few are even complaining to Curtis.

“What about when you started a relationship with my mom, when I was 10, and because she and you were too busy having fun, I was left alone to take care of Jacob, Sierra, and Emanuel for 3 years. I made them what would barely pass as edible food, cleaned up after them, made sure they got to and from school, that they had good grades, basically being their 10-year-old parent. And I had to check in on mom to make sure you didn’t leave her in a position that would have put her life in jeopardy, and even clean her sheets from the accidents you left her laying in.”

“What about my brother Jacob? You made me call during the very worst of our sprees so that he could see how deeply depraved you had made me, screaming at him incomprehensibly to “GET OUT!!!” Soiled from both ends, passing out and regaining consciousness over and over.”

“What about Sierra? She had 6 friends and 1 acquaintance commit suicide that semester. And your idea of a fun time was to pour a 5th of Captain Morgan down my throat along with 70 to 80 antidepressants. So in what had been one of the worst weeks of her young life, she had to watch as her oldest brother barely clung to life, and was carted away on a gurney. Each time the gurney bumped while going down the stairs blood would drip off my arm pooling on each step for her to clean up after we had gone.”

“Ok Charlie, I’ll take the blame for what I did to your mom and in retrospect your family at the time, because thanks to her need to say goodbye to me one last time our relationship probably wouldn’t have started so early. I’ll thank her with my dying breath for that. You give my life meaning, Charlie. And when you say, pardon my French, that I’m some puppet master with my arm up your ass, I want you to realize that you're the puppet master Charlie, pulling the strings of my heart.”

“I don’t care that your family doesn’t want us together. They’re just still bitter over how it went down between your mom and me. All I care about is you and me. The world is our oyster. You want to write Charlie? I’ll help you come up with what to write about, and we can stay up all night bouncing dialogue and character ideas off each other. You want to be a physicist, I’ll be there to help you get through school, long study sessions in the labs and libraries. Whatever you want, the world is ours if you’ll just take my hand. It’ll be just you and me against the world. Till death do us part.”

“And we can even get Eliza back. She’ll see your depression isn’t beating you down anymore, and that you're actually functioning, working, and working towards your dreams. She’ll come running back to you finally recognizing you as the man she fell in love with in the first place, instead of the one you became after being trapped in the darkness for years.”

I’m chuckling, loving the thought of maybe finally having something published, and heartbroken at the thought of getting Eliza back. I want all these things so badly to be true, but coming from his mouth assures they never will, at least not with him at my side.

“Can you tell me the truth, Jerry?”

“What's that?”

“Even though I know that all of what you said just now was a lie, and even with all the pain you caused me still fresh in my mind. Why? Why? Why do I still want you? I want you so goddamn much, with every fiber of who I am. I don’t know why, but I do. And I still would, even if all you were promising me was 2 or 3 nights in a hotel room where I could have my fill of you, with a 95% chance I would end up dead.”

Jerry takes my hand.

Weakly on the verge of tears, I mutter “why?”

Looking down at both of my hands wrapped around a cup of Rum and Coke on the rocks, dripping with condensation, ice halfway melted. Tears started to drip down my cheeks.

“So, Charlie? What will it be?” Jerry whispers in the back of my mind.