Me & Louis

At the risk of sounding kind Oedipal, Louis’s mom had always been a stunner.

It wasn’t just great genes, either-- she worked at looking young; I remember her with cucumbers on her eyes and mud masks on her face and the hum of her treadmill. Every once in a while she’d ask Louis and me if we could see her crows-feet as we sat in front of the Nintendo. Louis’s mom claimed she had to keep a youthful appearance because she was the top real estate agent in our county which meant her face was plastered on benches and billboards all over the city.

Louis once told me his mother was good at her job because she was pretty sure the way to fix shit is to cover it up with more shit. Lou said, “All day long she tells her clients to fix their houses up with vinyl siding or a fresh coat of paint and some poor sucker will snap it right up without knowing they just mortgaged a pile of junk under a fresh coat of paint.”

I had no idea how many coats of paint were on the walls in Louis’s house but during the summer of 1994, the walls were painted neutral shade of beige. We were fourteen years old and Louis’s mother’s boyfriend Perry had just moved in to their house.

“We could go to your house and watch HBO,” I suggested to Louis. 

We’d ridden our skateboards to 7-11 for Slurpees and had gotten kicked out of three parking lots, all the while dodging shouting businessmen, one mother and on our last attempt, the cops.

“Nah. There isn’t anything on,” Louis said, then spit bright blue Slurpee spit on the curb. “Let’s go to yours.”

“Okay,” I agreed easily enough. 

It had taken six more dumb excuses over the next three weeks for me to finally become suspicious that Lou was avoiding his house, which was odd, because his house was our home-base. His mom bought good snacks, he had the ultimate cable package and no bedtime. Lou’s mother was hardly ever home and he only went to his father’s in Connecticut for two weeks over Christmas break, so staying at Louis’s was better than hanging out at just about anywhere else.

My house, in particular, was riddled with rules and long hours of boredom, especially considering we could be at Lou’s house, eating Doritos and watching filth on T.V.

The hum of my mother’s vacuum was making a hot and irritable day worse. I closed the refrigerator door and turned to face Louis.

“Everything here sucks, we’re going to your house.”

“Nah. Let’s just go find Artie. He said he’d be up at the school later. Ramsey and Kyle were coming, too. Artie said he might be able to get some pot from his cousin.”

“That’s at like, nine o’clock tonight,” I said, squaring my shoulders.

I was taller than Louis at that point, by at least a couple of inches, but I never actually noticed, not until that moment. He was looking up at me, irritated, but said nothing.

“What’s the deal at your house, anyway?” I asked.

“Nothing’s the deal,” Lou said, then swooped around me to open the fridge door again. He emerged with a piece of bologna and rolled it into a cylinder before taking sticking the entire thing in his mouth. “Perry’s always there. He sucks.”

“Doesn’t he have a job?” I scoffed.

“His job is being a leach on my mom,” he said quite flip and then, quite grave, “I hate him.”

“Your mom still into him?” I asked, because his mom had always been awesome so I couldn’t really imagine her being with a guy who wasn’t so awesome and truthfully, Louis was kind of spoiled. 

It’d been mostly just him and his mom since the second grade, and while she worked a lot, she adored Louis. She was always buying him the latest and greatest, and when she was home, she’d make us Rice Krispie treats and ask us about school and friends. She’d listen with great interest, particularly to Louis even when he was just going on about nothing, but she’d be smiling proudly like he was reciting Shakespeare. I had a feeling Louis’s problem with Perry was simply that he didn’t much like his mother’s attention being divided.

“I guess she is,” he said. “But who knows? I don’t think she’s around long enough to notice he’s a total jerk. She wants me and Perry to go to a baseball game together.”

Louis turned and looked at me.

“A baseball game together,” he repeated and then laughed and I did, too but then he said, “I think I hate my life.”

“It’s the dad thing,” I said, grabbing a glass from the cabinet.

Louis’s mother openly lamented the fact that there was no man in the house to set an example for Louis. She said it all the time when Lou pulled an attitude with her. 

“If there was a man here, teaching you how to be a man, it wouldn’t be this way!” she’d call up the stairs. “I don’t have the equipment, Lou! I can’t be a father!”

And that would make us laugh and generally resolve the tension in the house until the next time they’d argue.

Over the next couple of weeks Louis got more irritable—when I saw him at all. He’d said he’d sprained his wrist when he said he’d miscalculated a jump on his board and he couldn’t skate until it healed, so Artie and I went at it alone for a while. That was fine. The truth was I was so sick of Lou being grouchy that it was relieving to have him gone for a while. 

And then it was August 24th, a Wednesday at around 11:15 p.m. 

I was lying on my bed after I’d had a shower. It was so hot and humid that I had a fan blowing directly on me despite the air conditioning being on full blast. I was staring at the television on top of my dresser, attempting to doze off when Louis rapped on my window, no doubt mangling the shrubs that sat below it. I got up and slid the window open, but it was too dark to really be able to see Lou clearly.

“You could’ve knocked,” I said with a laugh. “My mom would’ve just let you in, you tool.”

Louis easily hefted himself through my window; at the sight of his face I did a double-take and turned the light on.

“What the heck—“ I started it all with a smile, because we were always banged and bruised up pretty good in those days, when we were still just learning about, well, everything. We didn’t know how to steadily execute and maneuver jumps on our skateboards, our bikes or our lives, for that matter.

“Listen, you got any money? Like, any? Even just a couple of bucks?” Louis asked. His left eye was wide and wet, the other was puffy, red and really soon it’d be purple, black, and completely swollen.

“What?” I asked as my heart started to pound heavy in my chest.

“What’re you doing, Lou?”

He went to my desk and I watched the way he held his hand up close to his chest. It was definitely swollen and awkwardly bent; it was gnarled looking, like an old man’s.

“Leaving,” he said. “I can’t stay here—listen. My mother gets back from her conference tonight—her flight is in at like, midnight and I’ll be back in a couple days, you tell her, okay?” he asked but his words were rushed as he shuffled things around on my desk, scooping up quarters.

“Where are you going? Louis? What?”

“I hit him back,” Lou said, kind of holding his hand up, then he barked out a harsh sounding laugh. “I hit him back and I think I broke my hand but I know I broke his face.”

“Perry.”

Once I said it, I knew it to be true. Once I said it, it made all the sense in the world. Lou had never hated anyone for no good reason and I was ashamed I’d ever thought otherwise. 

“The house is a mess, we broke my mom’s lamp and a couple of her frames got cracked,” Louis said. He just kept saying all these words like we were just having a chat over a couple of cheese sandwiches or something, except he kept shaking his good hand and shaking his head. “Perry tripped on something and I took off and came here.”

“He’s been hitting you?” I asked. 

A warm breeze came through my open window, sweeping through the room and making it smell like imminent rain. Right there, in my white and blue bedroom, it felt like the real world was creeping in with the rain. Maybe not the real world. Maybe the mean world.

“Listen, I’ve got to get to my Dad’s.”

“In Connecticut?” I asked. “Did you call him?”

“No. I just wanna go. You got any money? I mean, any?”

“I’m gonna get my mom.”

“No,” Louis said. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal, I’m just gonna go to my dad’s for awhile—“

“What about your mom?”

“He doesn’t hit her. I’d kill him—“

“Lou. Does she know?” I asked.

“No. And don’t tell her, either. She’ll kill herself or something. She’d blame herself.”

I thought to myself that maybe she just should blame herself.

Louis stood there, his eye getting grosser and worse by the second, his warped hand cradled to his chest. For the second time, I noticed how short and little Louis really looked. Especially when he started to cry.

“I hate him!” he shouted suddenly and with that, put his good fist through my closet door and sobbed out loud as he kicked over my desk chair.

It turned out, I didn’t need to tell my mom at all, because both of my parents busted in during the middle of Louis’s tirade. At first, I think they thought we were having a fight, but it got clear really quick.

I thought my mom would about explode on Louis for putting a hole in my closet door, but she gripped both of his arms then wiped his bruised and tear stained face with her cool and clean hands. Lou cried softer and over his head, my mom stared at me, her eyes questioning.

“His mom’s boyfriend beat him up,” I said. Louis let my mom hug him. 

I wanted to look away, it was too humiliating and too awful to bear, but I didn’t. I made myself stay right there next to Louis. I made myself keep my wide open eyes on him because as bad as it was for me, it was unimaginably worse for Lou. I wouldn’t let him live this awful moment alone.

My dad left the room and my mom let Louis go, calling for my dad to come back, to not get himself sent to jail for beating up Perry. I couldn’t picture my father, in his Dockers and loafers, Minivan keys jingling in his pocket, sitting in jail much less beating someone up. It was in that moment I learned that you can never be too sure about fathers and what they’re made of.

“I’m calling the police,” my mom said. 

Louis sat on my floor, his back against the wall and peered up at my mother. 

“Wait. Can I just please call my dad first?” he asked. “I just wanna talk to my dad.”

I handed him the cordless and my mom looked unsure, which was unsettling, because mothers never seem to be unsure. She didn’t stop Lou from calling his dad, but she did usher me out of the room so Lou could make his call. As I shut the door behind me and my mom, I heard Lou say “Dad? It’s me.”

Things went how they go after these kinds of things happen, but a few things stick out about that night.

When we waited for the police I sat with Louis in my room, our silhouettes were still and silent in the blue glow of the television. I suppose we looked the same, just like any other night, but it felt like everything had changed. My bones felt older somehow, heavier under my skin. Lou’s eyes looked weary and there was a stillness about him that I’d never noticed before. And I knew, just like that, we were older. 

As we sat there side by side, it occurred to me that of all the places Lou could’ve run to, he ran to me. I didn’t have to wonder if I would’ve run to him if it were me. I would have. 

I guess that was the biggest difference between tonight and every other night that came before: my best friend had become my brother.

A few hours had passed by the time my father showed up with Lou’s mother. Lou and I were called us downstairs, at which point it was already a new day, the violence from yesterday had bled right into a new day.

Lou had been right about how his mom would react; she freaked right out and cried. My mother gave her coffee and then she cried into that, too, and then into the phone when my father put it in her hand and told her to call the police.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Louis?” his mom asked, holding on to his collar and then his shoulders. 

“You liked him,” Lou said lamely.

“I don’t like anyone that hurts you,” she said. 

Maybe it was one of those things no one but Louis would ever understand, why he kept that secret for as long as he did.

The cops came to our house and took pictures of Louis’s face. For a few weeks afterward, they investigated his mom and whatnot, but it all worked out. Perry went to jail but not for too long, I mean, not long enough. It was just your standard domestic violence crap, the kind you hear about every day. It was just one of those things that was life altering and eye opening and pivotal and a shove toward harsh cynicism and adulthood-- you know, the kind of thing that happens all the time. 

There were the usual tragedies and triumphs over the years for me and Louis. There were girls and the subsequent heartbreaks. There was an awful car accident and a struggle with addiction. We fought with each other and we rooted for each other. We dropped each other off at airports and said many goodbyes but not more than we said our hellos. There was the birth of his daughter and the day we buried my mother. There were scares and laughs and stupid conversations and the times we needed someone and could think of no other person on earth to call. What I mean is, life is comprised of a series moments, some mundane and some so huge that you are changed forever—but whether Lou and I were together for those moments or thousands of miles apart, we were never alone for them. We were family.