A Run-On Sentence

It’s when his phone vibrates too loudly against the nightstand that he notices he hadn’t brought it with him to dinner. But instead of surprise, all he can think is, Roaming charges. And, maybe if someone charged me for roaming I’d get back on my damn path. It’s a bitterly silent shout that doesn’t quite merit an exclamation point, never mind vocalization.

He shakes his head and reaches for the phone. He stands, because something about sitting on the oversized bed with its glossy, red wine comforter screams giving in, and he’s not about to go there yet, though he knows it’s probably inevitable. He mentally reviews the fact that there is a mini bar. It’s like checking that there’s still a certain file in a certain drawer, nothing more. He shuts that compartment and reads the text.

It’s from Adrienne. He sighs. He pinches the fleshy corner of his lips between his incisors in reproach. Adie. Don’t sigh. You love her. Like the mini bar, it’s a fact. He takes this one out of its folder and rests it across the tops of the others.

The text:

/ Have you settled into the hotel okay? Do you have time for a quick Skype tonight? Love you. /

Billie Joe taps his thumb in the reply field and the phone keyboard pops up. “No,” he says out loud, and it’s much more firm than he would ever say it to her. He assures himself he’s not saying it to her. He can’t be. As if to prove the point, his thumb hovers, lost, not knowing which words to swipe.

He glances toward the digital clock on the nightstand, then realizes the time was already glowing at him from the phone screen. Some habits are hard to break. At this thought he smiles ruefully. It’s already eight. Performing mental calculations, he pauses.

Is the difference eight hours or nine? He used to remember, but now it doesn’t seem like it matters. Just like the Pokémon names Joey had made him memorize years earlier, all the time zones have blurred together and he can’t be bothered to pick out where they overlap. He’s not dying to make up for his absence anymore.

It has to be four or five in the morning over there, and he can’t help but wonder why she would do that to herself for him.

He arranges some words together:

/ You should get some sleep. I don’t want you to get sick. We can talk in the morning, your evening. The hotel is fine. /

“Love you too,” he whispers. “I’ve just got too much going on right now to say it.” He tucks the fact of his love back in the drawer for now. Then he taps the send button. As he places the phone back on the nightstand, he looks to the one on the opposite side of the bed. His journal lies there on top of it. Everyone thinks he’s been jotting down lyrics in the pages, impressed with his productivity so soon after they’d put the final touches on Uno!, Dos!, and Tré! But they have it so wrong.

Billie Joe sits down on the bed, reaching for it. He avoids eye contact with the mini bar for several seconds, the journal in his hand. It is a noble effort, but it fails when his gaze skirts the bottom of the fridge. He tells himself it was an accident. The truth is he had to turn his head that way to see it.

He runs his fingers across the journal cover because he likes the feel of it. It’s Italian leather and soft. He found it in a bookstore there a long time ago, and maybe because the drawing that graces its cover is the kind of hideous yet familiar described by Freud in The Uncanny, he’d been saving it until recently. Saving it for a time when its contents would match the set of aesthetic values that had borne such a bloated distortion of a man’s face and the ink-stained folds of his crooked body.

He opens it to the last page with writing on it, and how anyone could have mistaken him marking down tallies for writing actual words is beyond him, even if his handwriting sometimes resembles chicken scratch. There are consecutive dates running down the page, and next to each one a series of lines have been drawn. If there are more than four, the fifth one runs through the others, binding them into one unit. If that unit greets a twin to its right, well, that was a bad day. Billie Joe stares at all his bad days, and he feels them staring back like fucked up 2D people. No more fucked up than him, though.

His phone shoots more vibrations into the wood of the nightstand, and Billie Joe thinks it sounds like murder. He reads the text.

/ Are you okay? /

He briefly considers chucking the phone at the wall. He doesn’t. He does slip off his sneakers. His feet have been trapped inside them for too many hours, and even the time he’s spent in air conditioning today hasn’t done anything to wick away the sweat gathered between his toes. He takes his socks off, too.

Billie Joe’s thumb dances across the touch screen. “No, I’m not fucking okay,” is what he tries to spell out, but he got this phone for free because, let’s face it, he’s famous and famous people receive more free things than would seem logical, if he’s being honest, and he doesn’t know yet that you have to change a setting so that it doesn’t automatically correct swear words, so what he actually writes is, “No, I’m not ducking okay.” He sees it. It’s not like he was going to send that one anyway, but oh, it makes him so angry. Actually, his blood is boiling over so hard that it’s bubbling, and the foam looks an awful lot like the stuff he usually sees floating on the top of his beer.

He hits delete.

/ I’m fine, just tired from traveling and would rather talk when we’re both awake. /

That one he sends.

His anger steals itself away and he scribbles the date in his journal. Next to it there isn’t anything. No lines yet. He checks the time again and it’s still eight. He’s made it so far. Scanning the page, he knows before his eyes come to rest there that the last time he drew a smiley face in place of tally marks was slightly over a month and a half ago. Seven weeks? A month and a half? He isn’t sure which set of measurements sounds worse so he uses both to scare himself. That number is why he so desperately needs to earn another one.

It’s eight. He’s made it this far. Surely he can write in the smiley face of accomplishment because he wouldn’t dare to negate the resolve he’d shown at dinner in not ordering a drink. Things of that sort happen so rarely, he mustn’t ruin it.

He can’t ruin it. It’s already eight. He can’t possibly. But he knows that if he draws it and then finds himself on the other end of the pen scratching it out that it will devastate him. And he tries to argue that maybe it will provide him extra incentive to keep going if he has to live up to its being there, has to protect it. But he already knows that it wouldn’t, that it won’t.

He puts the journal back down. Another text jolts him back to reality and he closes his eyes to shut it back out. When he opens them again he’s not looking at the phone, he’s looking at the bar. It’s more appropriate to call it a bar than a mini bar, really, because while the fridge is short it is also several feet wide, and looks as though it could hold enough booze for at least a small party, or maybe a burgeoning alcoholic.

Oh no, he’s thought the word! (Not that it’s the first time.) He turns to his phone.

/ Okay, goodnight then. /

/ Goodnight. / he types back.

Billie Joe thinks about changing out of his jeans. They cling to his skin and cut into his waist and all of a sudden tears prick at his eyes and his pants lie crumpled next to his head. He’s lying down. He’s lying down and he bites his lip to keep from crying out. Something has gone terribly wrong and he can’t pinpoint the exact origin. If he could it probably wouldn’t change anything.

He closes his eyes again as a raging desire sears through him, raging also because it enrages him. He does the only thing he can think of to stop himself from going for a bottle, and in his head he revises the word “stop” to “delay.” And, well, he really never should have sat down on that bed. It was the color of drink, but right now his hand is stroking himself to distraction.

He notices that his hand is rough, tries to avoid touching himself with the calluses grown into the tips of his fingers. His eyes spring open upon recalling that his other hand is the callused one. It’s not that his hand is coarse, really; it’s that it lacks motivation to be kind. He pictures nothing and no one as he throws himself into it again fiercely. Passion isn’t what drives his hand. Instead, it’s mechanical. He’s mechanical.

And like a machine that’s run out of fuel, he sputters out. Stops short. He goes limp, skin stinging, burning slightly after having been rubbed raw. And for what?

Billie Joe retrieves his hand from his boxers and lies there for a moment. Then he sits up and cricks his neck to the right to rid it of a kink that he can’t even feel is there until it pops free. It begs the question of whether he knew he needed to, or whether he was just looking for something to do. That impulse leads him to bend down to his suitcase, open haphazardly on the floor, and grab a fresh T-shirt. Not that any of his T-shirts are really “fresh” any longer, since they have all been worn by now on one of his myriad “bad days.”

He pulls the shirt he’s wearing up over his head and for a second checks on the status of the roll of skin round his stomach which has been steadily growing thanks to his extra liquid meals, and despite the increased exercise regimen he’s put in place to be able to say, “At least I’m doing something right.” He pulls the new shirt back down over it.

“You’re fucked, kid,” he says out loud, and he rubs his eyes because he’s tired. The motion only seems to underscore how misplaced the youthful tag really is. Something changes once you can admit to being exhausted. He is so tired, and he considers going to bed now, before that dry eight inadvertently becomes a drowning nine. But something—it—won’t let him.

He remembers he’s in Lisbon, a place he associates with young girls committing suicide. He mulls over that word, suicide; he chews the concept, then the option. It doesn’t seem real to him; it never really has. But still, it’s the kind of word that if he scans a newspaper he’ll find first, like one whose meaning he’s just learned yesterday and now hears everywhere, as if it’s only suddenly exploded into existence. It doesn’t even approach strange anymore that he knows absolutely nothing about the Virgin Suicides, yet here he is made conscious that there is something, that something happened maybe not here in Lisbon, but somewhere, and it had something to do with suicide.

Billie Joe has something to do with suicide, too, and with the fatality of a man facing his own execution he slowly gets up and walks to the mini bar. He is only going to see what’s inside in order to satisfy his curiosity. He believes this completely, but he’s also not stupid enough to think it’s remotely true. He knows that it ends there. He knows that it continues there.

Billie Joe knows, with frightening clarity, that as he opens the fridge door he’s committing his own version of suicide…and his brand, one of unconscious compulsion, more closely resembles murder. It sure is sneaking up on him, anyway.

The weapon(s)? They stand neatly in a row: the wily whiskey, the wicked white wine, the vodka which is his vice, the capricious kahlua, and a host more. His heart contracts both in relief and in fear. What he wouldn’t give for the fridge to have been empty, but thank God it’s not.

He grabs a bottle of Sagres, Lisbon’s most popular beer. He’ll just have one. And it’s beer—low alcohol content. The smiley face may be out of reach now, he thinks, but one lonely line next to today’s date is still an accomplishment. Hell, if it’s one today it might be zero tomorrow. He’s such an optimist.

Billie Joe takes a sip, and it tastes good. It bubbles affectionately against his tongue.

The second sip loses some of its charm when Billie Joe recalls that yesterday’s binge had started with beer too. He doesn’t have to confirm with his journal that that had led to more. And he has known since several hours beforehand that it will end the same way tonight.

Which is maybe why his drinking speeds up in place of slowing down. He couldn’t stop even if he wanted to, yet that part of him that craves it fears that if he downs the drink too slowly he might actually have the judgment to stop… He gulps and he swallows, he guzzles, and he chugs. He sets the empty bottle down on the floor and opens the fridge for another.

Billie Joe recognizes the difference between this and the times he’s tried to allow himself a little to prevent going all out later. He is slowly coming to terms with the fact that you cannot simply drill a hole into the side of a dam and expect it to hold itself together. Then again, it’s probably more accurate to imagine the dam already broken and him, the lone worker trying to repair it as the water rushes past over his head.

He drills the corkscrew into the white Zinfandel’s stopper, silently thanking the hotel for its foresight in having attached it with a magnet to the fridge door. God, the whole world is full of enablers. Why isn’t anyone telling him to stop? He’s done everything he can on his own: avoided liquor stores until he couldn’t, asked Adie to handle the grocery shopping, written the loud instruction “DON’T DRINK” onto his daily checklist.

He’s done everything he can on his own. Whether it’s embarrassment or pride or simply the addiction that keeps him from confiding in someone, anyone, he’s not sure. He is sure that he need not pour himself a glass, though, because his relationship with alcohol no longer requires formality. They’re past that.

Billie Joe gets up, because if he’s being honest, alcohol is just about the most boring companion in the world, and he can’t even taste it anymore through the constant barrage of its conversation, so he might as well walk around, explore the limits of his hotel room.

Above the armchair in the corner hangs a painting. It resembles something he’d expect to find in a museum instead of a hotel, although he supposes that perhaps this is reasonable considering he’s in Europe. It looks like it’s from that era when nobody painted anything other than angels. Billie Joe stares idly, wine flowing past his tongue, not really that interested. He considers angels to be hopelessly boring.

He’s finished the Zinfandel, which means another trip to the mini bar. Returning with tequila is either brilliant or incredibly idiotic. He hates tequila. It’s the color of piss and it doesn’t taste much better. If anything can put him off consuming the rest of the supply, it’s this. Alternatively, it might only encourage him to get it over with faster so he can have something better.

He grimaces involuntarily as he takes the first swig, already careening towards the latter. He focuses again on the painting, and hopes looking at a bunch of naked cherubs will somehow ground him. They are pink and rosy, while his face has become red and splotchy, as if his very skin were bloodshot. He’s starting to feel it. There’s one cherub that feels it too, it looks like, and Billie Joe wonders what was running through the artist’s head when they decided to paint him lying face down in a shallow pool while his friends partied on obliviously and without clothes. He wishes he could un-see himself drowning in a shallow pool of his own vomit.

This is getting depressing.

The more liquor passes his lips, the more he’s done caring, or the less he cares. He’s not sure there’s a difference, but there might be, and he’s not sure what that might mean, either.

Soon he sits on the floor, surrounded by a small collection of empties, head in one hand and the second Sagres from the pack of six in the other. About an inch of beer rests in the bottom. “That’s it,” he says, referring to the inch, “I’m done after this.” It’s gone in an instant, and he sets it down next to the others.

He’s done, but he’s still depressed when he surveys the damage. The bottles are like a broken stained glass window around him.

For a moment, this is the aftermath. It’s unsightly. It makes his head swim.

Just keep swimming, he thinks, like his favorite movie to watch with the kids when they were younger. Now he’s taking advice from an animated fish, though this isn’t exactly what Dory meant.

Billie Joe thinks that he’s done until he sees a couple drops pooled in the ends of the bottles waiting. He might as well…

At first he waits for them to roll towards his open mouth, but he doesn’t use this approach for long; he’s too impatient. He taps the glass and stretches his tongue out to meet the alcohol like some kind of demented anteater.

And then he groans when there really isn’t anything left, and he groans louder as he fetches the whiskey. “What the fuck!” he yells, unable to comprehend his own thought process, if he even has one and it’s not just some glitchy program running in the background at this point. He pictures himself banging his head against the hotel room wall, as one might hit an old TV whose screen has gone fuzzy. Perhaps if he had more guts he’d actually do it.

A knock on the door snaps him out of it. He rocks forward onto his knees—a blurry attempt to stand—and some of the glass next to him clinks loudly together. For a few seconds, Billie Joe waffles between hiding the evidence and letting himself be found out. Another knock, this one more insistent, spurs him into action without his quite having made a decision. He grabs two of the empty bottles and, draping a shirt over them, hides them in his suitcase. Two doesn’t really make a dent, though, but he doesn’t have time to regret it.

He flings the door open too fast, and it sets everything spinning. Mike is spinning, and the worried lines in his brow are spinning, too.

“Hey,” Mike greets him monosyllabically. He’s holding his phone in his left hand, down by his side. He hesitates, and his eyes flick aimlessly up at the ceiling. “So,” he says, actively avoiding eye contact, and the sentence ends there.

All Billie Joe can see is the stubble poking its way out of Mike’s chin, then the bags under his eyes looking like smooth, purple shells. The alcohol flowing through his system has made him hyper focused on small sections of space tonight. Mike is tired too, he thinks.

“So Adie sent me a text,” Mike tries again. “She asked me to check in on you and make sure you were okay.”

His jumping gaze lights upon the very visible evidence of his friend’s drinking—the inanimate evidence, not the blown-up living fingerprint standing before him. He clenches his jaw, and then releases it and swivels it around as if to shake off the tension.

“I can see that you’re not.”

Billie Joe’s slow heartbeat leaps because being found out terrifies him, but he’s never wanted anything more. At once, a million plans to make the gravity of his situation more obvious flash through his head, or at least it seems like a million. He might be overestimating himself, though, because if he actually counted he’d realize he’s only come up with three: straight-up tell Mike, throw up at his feet, or pass out without warning. (Hey, no one said they were good ideas.)

“I’m fine,” he says tersely. He thinks one thing and does another. He feels like that video game he played with Jake where suddenly all the controls inverted because he got hit by Confusion.

Luckily Mike isn’t so confused, unless you count how he’s let how it’s come to this slip past him like some nefarious character lurking in the shadows. As far as he’s concerned the hows and whys are second string to the raw fact of it.

“No, you’re not.” He doesn’t know when it became necessary to talk to Billie Joe in such a parental tone, and he doesn’t appreciate having to.

Billie Joe wonders why he hears echoes of his mother in Mike’s voice. It’s no mystery though, really.

“Oh yeah?” he leers back. Up is still down. Right is still left. He wants to scream at Mike, “Help me!”

Mike frowns slightly, almost as if he can hear him but doesn’t know how to respond. “Billie,” he says, sighing. “How much have you had tonight? This has to stop.”

“You have to stop!” Billie Joe throws back in his face, much like a hot-blooded amateur boxer who counterattacks before deciding whether to throw a right or a left hook and does neither. He wants to crumple down on the floor and just stay there. He doesn’t want to walk back to the mini bar and grab the vodka, but that’s what he does. His eyes are dry but he wishes they weren’t. Who is he?

Mike clenches his fists unconsciously as he watches his friend destroy himself. “You are being a child,” he growls, drawing himself up to his full height. He can tower when he wants to, and he towers now.

This only serves to intensify the spirit behind Billie Joe’s defiance. He swallows some vodka, and it’s harsh on his throat. “I’m dealing with an adult problem, I’m pretty sure,” he spits, clutching the vodka bottle close.

Mike shuffles his weight. Was that an admission?

Perhaps Billie Joe has broken the spell. An intense pressure squeezes the sides of his skull and he becomes momentarily dizzy. He seems to be falling over—either that or the world is tilting too far on its axis. He stretches his hands out for balance, forgetting in the process that he has been holding something, and that something is not only fragile but unexpectedly heavy, and that heaviness contributes to the force with which the glass bottle hits the edge of the coffee table separating him and Mike, and it hits close enough to the line dividing the two halves of it that one half slices past the other quite cleanly until it lands in a mess on the floor. But all this happens in slow motion.

He has been speeding through the night thus far and the sudden change in pace trips him up. The first thing he realizes is that no, he was never falling. The second realization lags a bit behind the first, and like the aftershock of an earthquake it catches him off guard while he’s distracted by his good fortune in surviving unscathed.

The wetness that he feels spreading over the top of his left foot is too warm for chilled liquor.

Mike stares at the uneven chunk of glass which has embedded itself into Billie Joe’s bare skin and goes quiet. He may not have been talking before, but any words waiting in line to come out have been eaten.

Billie Joe speaks where Mike does not. “You know, it barely even hurts,” he muses, watching the blood collect around its glass epicenter, oddly detached.

Rubbing his temples to get a better handle on the situation, Mike comes to his senses enough to suggest that they call the front desk for first aid. He dials out of the room and they send someone up to help.

The man who comes doesn’t need to speak English in order to figure out that the guy with the glass stuck in his foot isn’t interested in going to the hospital for stitches. Drunken rock stars never are. He calmly disinfects the wound and then binds it with some gauze and medical tape before bowing out again. The time that he is there is spent in silence, and lingers afterward.

Quietly, Mike breaks it. “Could you…would you be able to slow down if we asked you to?”

Billie Joe understands that this “we” is loaded with family-caliber bullets, that it includes Adie, his children, the men he’s shared a band with for 20 years… And even knowing all of that weight is in the chamber asking him not to pull the trigger he’s had his finger there for what seems like ages. So he answers truthfully, because he is scared.

“No, not on my own.” His voice wavers. “Not on my own,” he repeats.

He is sitting on the corner of the bed, and, seeing his friend about to dissolve into tears, Mike sits down next to him. He rubs his back in soothing circles as he mulls over what to say that would help. There are no words that will do better than actions, but he supposes that words just might sow some necessary actions here.

“We can get you help,” he says more assertively than he feels it to be true. Something about the scene he’s witnessed tonight has seemed less like the climax of a story or the long-awaited intervention on reality TV than a strangely flat rendering of something originally designed to be 3D. It unnerves him.

Billie Joe senses it too, even as he accepts Mike’s offer sincerely and without pause.

“Okay.”

Maybe it’s that each word between them has been standing in for a thousand, to ill effect.

In any case something is missing, because he’s pretty sure that last word should have brought him some relief in knowing that everything is one step closer to being solved. But he still can’t see the end, because someone keeps racking the focus back on the camera. The sharpest parts of the picture are the ones he’s already seen, and it’s frustrating.

Mike confirms with Billie Joe that he’ll be alright tonight on his own. Billie Joe promises to go to bed, so he tells himself it will be fine if he leaves. Though a certain doubt follows him out the door, it is easier to deal with that than the embarrassment of letting Billie Joe know he doesn’t trust him anymore.

Once Billie Joe is alone again, his mind returns to words. It’s a funny thing, how he has so many, yet they never reach the air. They’re being diverted. But to where?

He turns out the lights and climbs into bed, brain still fuzzy. He shuts his eyes, expecting to fall asleep right away. But there is a pale throbbing in his foot. He turns over, careful to avoid brushing it against the sheets. He does a fair job of that, but has less success trying not to picture the bits of sticky glass that never got picked up littering the carpet near the coffee table.

From there it’s all too easy to imagine the empty bottles peeking out of the open suitcase, and then the remaining contents of the mini bar. If he were to drink tomorrow, he would probably start with the kahlua.

And then it clicks for him; it all falls together. He has been writing down words in his journal, it’s just difficult to figure out their shape when they’re all crowded together. They aren’t lyrics, or a poem, nor can they be said to form a story. They simply spell out his addiction in endless clauses—dependent after dependent after dependent—connected by coordinating and subordinating conjunctions and relative pronouns, disconnected again in terms of reason, and glued together by various impermanent fixtures of the punctuation landscape while buying time for anybody from the headlining act, .!?, to put in an appearance and close the show… This has all been just a run-on sentence.

And tonight—tonight is another fucking comma.