Passing the Torch, Passing the Poison

“I’ll see you again soon,” I whimper through vodka-soaked tears. I was eighteen, drunk again, and about to leave him and his apartment for my first semester of college. Before all of my scars took form, before the tattoos I stuck on over them to cover them up, before things stopped making sense. Before I was all alone. I wish I'd never left.

We used to drink how we always would; a thirty rack of Bud open on the floor- four of them in the freezer, four on the coffee table, a handle of vodka unscrewed with a lingering warmth from the leathery hands that wrapped around it and passed it back and forth. An old movie that you’d claim was another “classic” that I “just had to see” would be playing loudly in the background.

I don’t know what is more impressive, the fact that I can recall the plot of every movie we watched alongside the jokes we came up with to accompany them, or the pure durability of our livers.

I regret not drinking every drop of beer and liquor and smoking every last cigarette in the packs we sucked down when I’d come over every other day. If I had taken the brunt of it all, as I know with absolute confidence that I could have, maybe things would be different now. Different for both of us, I’m sure.

No dorm-room beer pong tournament, frat house party, or bar crawl ever got me as high as I would get on that dirty, old, green futon. I remember its smell better than I can recognize my own stench; stale cigarettes, vanilla candles, and a spring rainfall onto blacktop that wafts in through the cracks below the door and those in the window sills.

Since I was at least fourteen, people have been asking me the same question: “What do you want to be?”

I’d spit something that sounded clever back out at them like, “An entrepreneur,” which I’ve come to learn is a fancy way of saying the truth without having to embarrassingly utter it, “I have no clue, but I need money to survive.”

Nobody ever asked me what I wanted to do.

I think that in another life, I would have been happy, much happier than I am now, spending the hours of daylight shoveling mulch, digging holes, knocking down drywall, stacking bricks, moving furniture- anything analogous to the work he could scrounge up at the time. I would have been happy knocking off the dirt on my boots against his apartment’s brick wall exterior before waddling inside, tired and sore, to the warmest smile and biggest hug I’ve ever come to know.

In that life, I may have had some potential skills that I would have been forgoing for quick checks as a laborer- a skill that has yet to be unlocked and discovered in my papers and lecture halls. But I would have been content and happy to know that nothing real would change in my life except for the seasons. Not like how it’s all about to change now.

Until I’d made love for the first time and asked him for my first beer during the Christmas after I turned fourteen, he and I would always have fun. But we had not yet come to understand each other. Not really at all. How could we? I think we shared an understanding of the concepts of each other; him, my father, tall, broad-shouldered, resolute, athletic, adventurous, my protector. And me, his small, scrappy son who loved to adventure and climb. Fun and games were our common ground to stand on. We had nothing but the weather and the scenery to discuss, and actions spoke louder than our words ever could have back then.

I had no idea who he really was, how delicately his scars just barely held him together, how afraid and hurt he was, until we spoke the same language.

Back then, when we first started to get to know each other, it simply felt like a good time. A good time with my best friend, who was such because he gets me; a shared sense of humor, feeling the same way about things never before uttered out loud, holding the same fears and resentments.

It wasn’t until I was on my way back here, yesterday, that I truly came to understand to what degree we understood each other. How I inadvertently walked the same path as him, the same path that he tried to warn me of and steer me away from the treacherous, bumpy path with his stories of warning. But, back then, they were just funny stories for us to laugh about. The lessons didn’t land until after I’d experienced their overlap with my own similar experiences.

Some people hypothesize that a son is a reflection of their father, but I never thought it to be so literal. As I stare at him lying in those white sheets, white faced, with his thin, white hair, in the overhead light of the white LEDs we’d never turned on, I see myself on my own deathbed. Though it may not be exactly how I go out, at least in this moment now, a part of myself is dying.

Until now, I’ve never had to care about anything. I skated by in school and chose the college major he pointed me towards when I was told to go to college to build myself a real future- a future I could not have cared less about. I didn’t care that my ex-friends hated me or that my new friends hated me, too. I didn’t care that my mom loved me and that I had another seventy years left to experience life. I didn’t care about the effects of the booze and the smoke until his cancer showed its ugly face and the chemo started to pump poison through his once-iron veins, once his red beard turned grey, once he found out exactly how many days he would have left, no more, no less. I didn’t care about anything except for the fact that my best friend was dying and that I couldn’t fight or bargain with God to try and change his fate.

All I cared about from when I was fourteen to this moment was busting my ass in whatever job would take my working papers and pay me weekly to get enough cash to pay for the drinks, the smokes, the weed, and the laundry I would supply to help ease my best friend’s pain. Now, after all of that pain, after nearly seven years of getting in and out of the car to and from the chemo appointments and a lifetime of suffering, the only thing I care about now is finding where the light in his beautiful, bloodshot, green eyes had gone, and if I could manage to get it back and keep him with me a little bit longer.

As I stand here on the misaligned vinyl floorboards that had splintered me a dozen times that now support the hospital bed they wheeled in for him, my only question is, “Where did the couch go? Where is the futon?”

His brother, my uncle, had thrown it away before I arrived. He was not as foolish as I am to believe that we’d get another day past his expiration date. Though it was gone, I can still smell it as if it remained, even through the pungent reek of spilled morphine and hand sanitizer.

In an instant, I shrink down, and I’m once again twelve years old, full of once-known innocence and well-known fear, bottled in all four feet of my developing bones. I climb up the side barriers and gently clamber over them onto the hospital bed to lie beside the shriveled Niflheim giant. My eyes search for any red left in his white beard from the days of our fun-filled past. Though I can only find a few strands in the abundance of piercing light, a flicker of hope ignites around my shrunken heart that’s being barely held together by ever-growing scar tissue.

My search returns to his eyes, desperately looking for something I once knew so well, as it remained through all of the good and bad days. I took it for granted. My face heats up as water swells in my tear ducts when one hundred pounds of gentle love wrap around my head and cradle my cheek. A deep exhale leaves his lips as his head leans over towards mine, gently resting our foreheads together. I carefully wrap my arm around him, snaking past the old chest shunt and the new wires that keep him here with me, but just barely. I catch the beauty and regret that the last bit of his soul has to offer to the world, to his family, to his boy, to the breeze that will miss holding him so much. For a brief moment, my wish is granted. The fire in my aching heart transfers over to his, and I take on all of his pain and his poison to bring him one moment of peace.

My guts twist into knots inside of me from the polyps and the poison, my spine cracks and compresses under the weight of the fear and responsibility that he silently carried for both of us, I cannot breathe as my lungs crush, unable to expand from all of the love he carried for me and his life, despite all of the hardships. In this moment of weightlessness, his eyes flicker as the light returns to them, and they gleam at me one last time.

“I love you, my son,” He softly smiles.

“I’ll see you again soon.”