Call Me When You're Sober

“I told you to take out the goddamn trash!” I shouted. I threw the bag at him, watching him cower in the corner.
“I…I’m sorry,” he murmured meekly.
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Twiggy. You never do a goddamn thing around here. You wanted to move in with me. You said that this would be good for us. Has it been? Huh? Has it?”
Twiggy shrunk into the wall, his boot kicking at the trash that had spilled out of the bag, littering the floor.
“Take…” I scooped up some of the trash, throwing it at him, “..out…” I threw some more, “…the…” I flung some at his face, “…trash!”
Scraping some noodles off of his face, he started picking up the mess.
“Next time, maybe you’ll be bothered to do your chores,” I hissed, walking past him, stopping to grind some of the nastiest waste into the kitchen floor. “Now you can scrub the floor, too.”
Twiggy was crying, and when he cried, I yelled. I turned around, and slapped him hard across the face. It only made him cry harder. Furious over nothing, really, I punched, kicked, and slapped him until he had a bloody nose and lip, and he already had bruises forming on his pale face.
I stalked out of the kitchen, leaving him a mess to clean up the mess I’d made. I went to paint in my studio, where I could have some much needed alone time. I stayed in there for nearly three hours. When I came out, I went back to the kitchen. It was sparkling clean. I could smell something baking in the oven, but Twiggy wasn’t anywhere nearby.
“Twiggs? Where are you?” I called him calmly. I wasn’t mad anymore. I didn’t really know why I’d been mad in the first place. “Twiggy? Are you hiding from me?” I began to open doors and closets. He wasn’t behind or in any of them. I began to panic, thinking that I’d hurt him enough that he’d left me, but I found him, finally, in the upstairs bathroom. He was bandaging a cut I’d given him with the sharp corner of one of my rings.
As soon as he saw me, Twiggy took the bandages and the bloody washcloth he’d laid on the counter, and darted out of the bathroom.
“Twiggy, come here,” I said gently, hoping he’d understand that I was calm now.
He stopped, frozen, a terrified look in his warm brown eyes.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I told him, reaching out to hug him. He shrank away, obviously not wanting to be comforted by someone who had hurt him.
“It was my fault,” he murmured. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“No. I hurt you. I never should have done that. You’re my best friend. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t be afraid.”
“I deserved it,” he said in a hollow, robotic voice.
I held him in my arms, rubbing circles on his back. “Never. No one deserves to be beaten. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, I’ve gotten in plenty of fights before, but I’ve never hurt anyone I’m really close to.”
“It’s fine,” he assured me, trying to get out of my arms.
I let him go. “I really am sorry, Twiggy.”
He nodded, and left the bathroom, obviously dying to get away from me.
I felt incredibly guilty. I had done a very bad thing, and he was blaming himself for it. That was the kind of person he was. He’d take any form of abuse, and blame himself for it. And he would never defend himself or fight back. I knew that about him. He simply didn’t have it in him to be aggressive.
A while later, I went down to the kitchen, smelling what promised to be a delicious dinner cooking. Twiggy was an excellent chef. He probably could’ve been a professional cook, if he wasn’t so dedicated to music.
“Hi,” he said tiredly, stirring one of the pans on the stove. In the past hour, the bruises on his face had darkened. I could distinguish handprints. I felt my stomach turn. Everyone would know. Everyone would blame me for what he looked like.
I went to the bar room and opened a bottle of vodka. I chugged it like Gatorade, and felt my nerves begin to calm.
“Dinner’s ready,” Twiggy called to me from the nearby kitchen.
I finished off the bottle, and took it with me to the dining room.
While he served dinner, I sat down, running a hand through my hair. I had to think. What was I going to do to cover up those bruises? I didn’t want people thinking I was a monster.
We ate in silence. Twiggy didn’t even look at me. I knew that this was bad. He never sat quietly like this. He was afraid to speak. Afraid that I’d hurt him again. His face was still swollen from the abuse he’d received earlier. I was afraid to even think about what the rest of him must have looked like.
“Twiggs,” I said gently, “I don’t want to lose you. I have a problem. I know I do. I’ll get help. I promise. Please don’t stop being my friend. You’re the only thing that keeps me sane, sometimes. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
He simply looked at me.
I sighed. “How bad is the rest of your body? Do I need to take you to the doctor?”
He shook his head.
“Let me see.” I dragged him out of his chair, and pulled up his shirt. There were bruises everywhere. I touched the most bruised area, along his thin ribcage, and I felt him shudder. As my hand moved down, I could feel that something wasn’t right. I touched the other side. It felt very different. I moved back to the odd place, pressing against it with the palm of my hand. I heard him squeak, and then, he trembled.
I knew why he was in pain. I’d broken his ribs. At least two of them. Maybe three. In spite of my vodka induced calmness, I knew how serious this was. I let his shirt fall back down, and looked into his eyes. They had tears in them.
“Twiggy, your ribs are broken.”
“It doesn’t hurt so much,” he whispered.
“Of course it does. Get your jacket. We’re going to the emergency room.”
His eyes widened. “No…please…I don’t want to go. I don’t want to…”
I grasped his upper arm roughly. “We’re going.”
He squirmed until he was free, and he ran up the stairs.
Now, I was angry again. I followed him up, grabbed ahold of him, and dragged him back down.
Somewhere around the halfway point of the staircase, he grabbed onto the railing to try to get away from me. I let go, not wanting to hurt him any more than I already had. I watched in horror as he tumbled down the stairs. Feet over head over feet over…down, down, down. To the landing, where he lay motionless, at an odd angle.
“Oh my God. Twiggy? Are you okay?” I knelt beside him. I didn’t know what to do, and all of the vodka was starting to make me a bit out of it.
I called Pogo. I don’t know why I didn’t call for help. At least Pogo was sober enough to know what to do. He called for the ambulance, and met us at the hospital.
It was two hours before they let us see Twiggy. He was conscious, but he had a concussion. He looked broken in both body and spirit.
“I’m sorry,” he said to me, though he looked at Pogo. “I had to tell them.”
I nodded. I could see the two officers heading into the room. I let them cuff me and take me away, tears filling my eyes. I knew that things were never going to be the same between Twiggy and I.
Of course, I was right. I had Pogo take my bail money out of my account, and I was back home by the next morning. Twiggy, however, never did come back home. As soon as he was out of the hospital, John and Ginger came for whatever things they thought he’d need, and he moved in with John until he could find his own place.
We barely spoke over the next few months, and I tried to fill the hole in my heart by making a new friend. I bonded with Tim quickly, and asked him to join the band before Twiggy had even left. I knew that I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t think that he had the strength to leave on his own.
Tim joined the band, and Twiggy left. John, Ginger, and Pogo all kept in touch with him for the first few months, but then, he distanced himself from us all. He had never been the same after that tumble down the stairs. The doctors said that he didn’t have brain damage, but I failed to agree.
The day after our first album without Twiggy came out, I woke up to the phone ringing at five am. It was John, sobbing, telling me to turn on CNN. I thought there’d been another 9/11 or Columbine or something. I flipped on the TV, and felt my heart shatter into a million pieces.
“…former Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White found dead early this morning. Police found no evidence of a struggle, so the death has been considered a suicide. He was twenty-seven years old. White is best known for-” I muted the TV, holding my face in my hands, just sobbing.
Twiggy was gone. I would never have the chance to make things right with him. If only I’d treated him better. I’d loved him, deep down. Closer than a brother. Almost like a lover. Now, he was dead. I’d loved him so much that I’d ended up being the reason he was dead. There was nothing I could do now but feel an overwhelming guilt eat at me for the rest of my miserable life.
I didn’t deserve to live. I had taken his life, even if I hadn’t been the one to directly do so. I had made him miserable. I had let him think that I had replaced him, as if that were possible. He would forever be the only one who would ever truly understand me. I had been such a fool to ever let him go. But it was too late for regrets.
I knew what I had to do. I had no choice, really. We had made a promise to each other, one drunken night after we’d first gotten close. If one of us died, the other would follow. It was what we both wanted. We knew we’d never be able to fully recover with the loss of the other. I fully intended to keep my promise.
After a bottle of vodka and a bottle of scotch, I went into the basement, took my pistol out of the safe, and went upstairs to my room. I grabbed a sheet of paper, and wrote three words on it. As I shot myself in the head, the paper fell from my hand, landing in the edge of the pool of blood. It read: ‘Twiggy, I’m coming’.