The Martini Shot

Plastic Paddy

“I hate Arabs,” said Paddy.

A guy sat facing a good-looking blonde in a booth against the far wall. The guy was minding his own business. He and the girl were splitting a pitcher of draft and smiling at each other across the table. He would say something, or she would, and the other one would laugh. It looked like they were having a nice time. Paddy was staring at the guy like he wanted to kick his ass.

“How you know he’s an Arab?” I said.

“Look at him,” said Paddy. “Looks like Achmed Z-med, that guy on T. J. Hooker.”

“Adrian Zmed,” said Scott, the smart guy of our bunch.

“Another Arab,” said Paddy. This was five or six years after the Ayatollah, Nuke Iran, and all that crap. Paddy was the only guy I knew who hadn’t given that up.

Me and Paddy and Scott were in Kildare’s, a pub up in Wheaton we used to drink at pretty regular. Wheaton was our neighborhood, not too far over the D.C. line, but a thousand miles away from the city, if you know what I mean. It was a night like most nights back then: a little drinking, some blow, then more drinking to take the thirst off the blow. Only this night ended up different than the rest.

I’d put the year at 1985, ’cause I can remember the bands and singers that were coming from the juke: Mr. Mister, Paul Young, Foreigner, Wham. Hell, you could flush the whole Top 40 from that decade down the toilet and no one would miss it. Also, Len Bias was lighting it up for Maryland on the TV screen over the bar, so I know it couldn’t have been later than ’85. Maybe it was early ’86. It was around then, anyway.

Paddy was up that night, and not only from the coke. He always seemed angry at something back in those days, but we had chalked up his behavior to his hyper personality. Just “Tool being Tool.”

O’Toole, I should say. Up until he was twenty-three, Paddy’s name was John Tool. Most everyone who knew him, even his old man before he kicked, called him Tool. It was a nickname you gave to a fraternity brother or something, like Animal Man or Headcase, which was all right around the fellas, but didn’t go over too good with the girls. Paddy liked it all right when he was growing up, but when he got to be a man he suddenly felt it didn’t suit him. Still, he wanted a handle, something that could make him stand out in a crowd. He wasn’t a guy you noticed, either for his character or his appearance. I think that’s why he changed his name. That and his women problem. He’d never had much success with the ladies, and he was looking to change his luck.

What he told us was, he’d paid to have one of those family-tree things done, and found that he was all Irish on his mother’s side. Turned out that his great-grandfather’s name was O’Toole. A lightning-strike coincidence, he said, that Tool and O’Toole were so similar. So he made the legal switch, adding Paddy as his first name. He said he liked the way Paddy O’Toole “scanned.”

It was around this time that he went Irish all the way. Started listening to the Chieftains and their kind. Became a Notre Dame fan, got the silver four-leaf clover charm on a silver-plated necklace, and had that T-Bird he drove, the garbage wagon with the Landau roof, painted Kelly green at the body shop where he worked. Then he fixed a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” sticker on the rear bumper, which totally fucked up what was already a halfway fucked-looking car.

Paddy began to drink more, too. I guess he thought that being a lush would admit him to the club. When he got really torched, he talked about his mother’s cooking like it was special or something, and referred to his late father as “Da.” His eyes would well with tears then, even though the old man had beat him pretty good when he was a kid. We thought it was all bullshit, and a little off, but we didn’t say nothin to him. He wasn’t hurting anyone, after all.

We didn’t say anything to his face, that is. Scott, the only one of us who had graduated from college, analyzed the situation, as usual. Scott said that Americans who had that Irish identity thing going on were Irish the way Tony Danza was Italian. That most Americans’ idea of Ireland was John Ford’s Ireland, Technicolor green and Maureen O’Hara red and Barry Fitzgerald, Popeye-with-a-brogue blarney. And by the way, said Scott, John Ford was born in Maine. I didn’t know John Ford from Gerald Ford, but it sounded smart. Also, it sounded like a lecture, the way Scott always sounded since he’d come back home with that degree. Scott could be a little, what do you call that, pompous sometimes, but he was all right.

So back to Kildare’s. For years we had gone to this other joint around the corner, Garner’s, made your clothes smell like Marlboro Lights and steak-and-cheese. But Paddy, who before he went Irish had never moved up off of Miller Lite, said the Guinness there was “too cold,” so we changed locales. “Kildare is a county in Ireland,” said Paddy, the first time we went in there, like he was telling us something we didn’t know, and Scott said, “So is Sligo,” meaning the junior high school where all of us had gone. Paddy’s mouth kind of slacked open then, like it did when he thought Scott was putting him on. I said, “Dr. Kildare,” just to hear my own voice.

Kildare’s wasn’t anything special. It was your standard fake pub, loaded with promotional posters and mobiles, courtesy of the local liquor distributors. The sign outside said “A Publick House,” like you could fool people into thinking Wheaton was London. I don’t know, maybe the hometown rednecks bought into it, ’cause the joint was usually full. More likely they didn’t care what you called it or what you dressed it up as. It was a place to get drunk. That was all anyone in these parts needed to know.

So the three of us were sitting at a four-top in the center of the room. I was hammering a Bud and Scott had a Michelob, another way he had of wearing his “I went to college” badge. Paddy was on his third stout, and there was a shot of Jameson set neat next to the mug. I didn’t know how he afforded to drink the top-shelf stuff. He made jack shit at the body shop and went through a gram of coke every few days. But he still lived with his mother over on Tenbrook, and it didn’t look like he spent any money on clothes. I guess his paycheck went to getting his head up.

“I Want to Know What Love Is” was coming from the jukebox. Lou Gramm was crooning, and I was thinking about my girl. I had met this fine young lady, Lynne, worked an aluminum siding booth up in Wheaton Plaza, who I thought might be the one. She had dark hair and a rack on her like that PR or Cuban chick who played on Miami Vice. I wanted to be with her but I was here. It was partly out of habit, and mostly because I knew Paddy would be holding. Also, Paddy had practically begged me to come. He didn’t like to drink alone.

“You guys ready to do a bump?” said Paddy.

“Shit, yeah,” I said. I mean, what did he think? Hell, it was why I was sitting there.

“I gotta work tomorrow,” said Scott.

“What’s your point?” said Paddy.

“It’s a real job,” said Scott. At the time, Scott was putting in hours at a downtown law firm and studying for what he called the “L-sats.”

Paddy looked over at the booth where the Arab dude sat, smiled kind of mean, then moved his eyes back to Scott. “Like my job isn’t real?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not the kind of job where you can just fall out of bed, stumble into a garage with a headache, and start banging out dings.”

“Oh, I get you. Big smart lawyer. What you makin down at that law firm, Scott?”

“Nothing. It’s an internship.”

“Better get in there refreshed in the morning, then. You wouldn’t want to lose a gig like that.” Paddy turned his attention to me. “Meet me in the head in a few minutes, Counselor. Okay?”

I had just dropped out of community college for the last time and had gotten this job at a local branch of a big television-and-stereo chain. The company called us “Sales Counselors,” like we were shrinks or something. Paddy thought it was a laugh.

“Okay,” I said.

“Watch this,” said Paddy, and he got out of his seat.

Paddy navigated the space between the floor tables and headed for the booth where the guy was drinking with the blonde. He walked right up to their table and bumped his thigh against it, hard enough to rattle their mugs and spill some of their beer. The guy looked up, not angry, just surprised. Paddy pointed his finger at the guy’s face and said, “Pussy.” Then Paddy made a beeline to the men’s room, which was down a serpentine hall. The doorman, one of three cousins who owned the place, was standing nearby. He saw the whole thing.

“That was smooth,” said Scott.

The guy at the booth was staring at us, like, what’s up with your buddy? Funny, with his face square on us, he did look like that Achmed Z-med dude. The blonde was busy mopping up the spilled beer with some napkins. I thought of going over to apologize, or shrugging to let them know that we were innocent in whatever had just happened, but I didn’t, ’cause it would have been a betrayal of my friend. I just looked away.

“The lucky leprechaun’s in rare form tonight,” said Scott. “You guys drop me at my parents’ place after this, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You want to get busted for something, that’s up to you, but I got too much to lose.”

“I said we would.”

Scott’s eyeglasses reflected neon from a Bud Light sign up on the wall. His hair was curly and short, and he was soft-featured and overweight. He had rose-petal lips, like a girl’s. Scott was one of those guys, you could tell what he was gonna look like when he got to be an old man, even when we were kids.

I pushed my chair away from the table, got up, and walked toward the head. The doorman was giving me the fisheye, his arms folded across his chest. I didn’t look at the Arab guy or the blonde.

I made it through the hall, black-paneled walls lit by a red bulb, and knocked on the locked men’s room door. Paddy opened up and I slid in. The room held a toilet, a stand-up urinal, and a sink, all on the same wall. The toilet didn’t have a door on it or nothin like that, so if you had to take a shit you did it in front of strangers. There was a casement window by the toilet, always cranked open some to let out the smell. Everything was filthy in here. Paper towels overflowed the plastic trash can by the sink and were crumpled like dirty white carnations on the tiled floor.

“Here you go, Counselor,” said Paddy. He held a small amber vial in one hand and a black screw-on top in the other. Inside the top, a small spoon dangled by a chain. He dipped the spoon into the vial and produced a tiny mound of coke that he held to my nose.

I could see that there wasn’t hardly any coke left in the vial. I knew if I did one jolt I’d be hungry for it the rest of the night. Even if we could find someplace to cop, I didn’t have the dough to buy any more, and I didn’t know if Paddy did, either.

I was thinking of this as I pressed a forefinger to one nostril and snorted the mound into the other. A good cool ache came behind my eyes.

Paddy produced another mound, and I did it up the other nostril the same way. He scraped out what was left in the vial and did that himself. He found some more in there somehow and rubbed that on his gums while I ran water from the faucet, wet my fingers, tipped my head back, and let some droplets go down my nose. Then I took a leak in the stand-up head.

“Hurry up,” said Paddy. “Everyone’s gonna think you’re in here suckin my dick.”

“No they won’t. ’Cause everyone knows you don’t have one.”

“Axe your mama if I have one.”

“Look, you gonna be a good boy out there?”

“I was just fuckin with that guy.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

I tucked myself back in and zipped up my fly. I was already speeding and there was a drip, tasted like medicine, back in my throat. I wished my girl was out there; I could break away with her if she was. But it wouldn’t be cool to split now, seeing as Paddy had just got me lit up. And by the time I got to her place, I’d be crashing. I’d hang with Paddy for a while, cop some more someplace, then knock on Lynne’s door later on.

We walked out into the hall. “Everytime You Go Away” was playing in the house. I felt tall and funny. Our waitress was going to the girls’ room, and I reminded her to wash her hands. She edged by us in the narrow passageway without even giving us a smile.

Good as I felt, I had forgotten about the doorman. My stomach flipped some as I saw him standing by our table. Our bill was on the table, and Scott was kinda slumped in his seat. We went there, and Paddy spread his hands, like, What’s going on?

“Pay your tab and get out,” said the doorman, pointing at the bill.

“We’re not finished drinking,” said Paddy.

“You’re finished,” said the doorman. “Pay your tab and get out.”

“What, ’cause of that guy?” said Paddy, jerking his head toward the Arab and the blonde. “He was bothering me. Sayin shit, and stuff. I wasn’t just gonna let it pass.”

“I saw the whole thing,” said the doorman. His face was ugly and it was stone. “Pay up and get out. You’re not welcome in here anymore.”

The doorman was short and wore one of those Woody Allen hats to cover his hair plugs. Basically, he was an insecure guy who liked to act tough. We all knew he couldn’t walk it, and he knew we knew, and it just made him more mean. He was not a physical problem, but the Harris brothers, a couple of guys worked nights in the kitchen, were. They had been wrestlers at our old high school, and there was no love lost between them and Paddy.

We dropped some money on the four-top. Scott stood and put some green in, too. A few of the drinkers at the tables and booths were checking us out with anticipation, waiting to see what we would do.

I already knew we weren’t going to do a thing. Paddy’s face had gone pink and he was just standing there, swaybacked, staring at his shoes. He was a pale-skinned strawberry blond who could have been handsome if his features had been hooked up better. I couldn’t say what made him unattractive exactly, but there was something off about his looks. Scott called him an inbred Redford.

The three of us walked out, slow enough to salvage some dignity. But we kept moving, and we didn’t give any more lip to the little doorman with the hair plugs. I locked eyes for a moment with the guy in the booth. He didn’t smile or anything, and he wasn’t gloating about us getting tossed, either. He handled it all right. It was us that came off looking like assholes.

Out in the lot, walking toward Paddy’s T-Bird, Scott said, “Say good-bye to Kildare’s, boys. We’ll never drink in there again.”

“No loss,” said Paddy. “We’ll just drink at Garner’s.”

“Aye, Garner’s,” said Scott. “I don’t think so, lads. The Guinness is too cold.”

“Big college smart-ass, now.”

“How green was my valley,” said Scott, with a lilt.

“Fuck you,” said Paddy.

“Suck what? ” said Scott.

They went on like that until we dropped Scott at his father’s house on Gabel. I didn’t get in on the conversation. I was too busy thinking of my next bump.

Paddy left rubber on the street, hard to do with that heavy car, as we drove away from Scott’s. He said that he was tired of Scott, how he wasn’t the same since coming back from that fancy school, how he only tolerated him ’cause Scott and me went back to elementary, all that.

“I ain’t goin drinking with him again,” said Paddy.

I didn’t comment, thinking that they would kiss and make up and we’d be up at Garner’s or someplace like it the next week. But it turned out Paddy was right.

We picked up a six of domestic in Four Corners and cracked a couple of cans straightaway. Both of us had a terrific thirst. Paddy drove down University Boulevard, then cut a left onto Piney Branch Road and took it to New Hampshire Avenue. We listened to a tape Paddy’d made, a balladeer named Christy Moore. He had a nice voice, with those whistles and pipes and shit like that in the background, but it sounded like something my father listened to, Vic Damone with an accent. I really thought Paddy had taken this Mick thing too far.

I saw where he was going as he cut up New Hampshire. They had garden apartments up along there where I’d heard you could cop. It was just above Langley Park — not as dangerous as Langley with the El Salvies and those crazy-assed Jamaicans, but still kinda grim. All varieties of Spanish here and a lot of blacks. Not that I was scared of ’em or nothin like that.

Paddy turned into the parking lot, found a spot, and cut the engine and the lights. We sat there killing the rest of our beers.

“Who we gonna see?” I said.

“Some girl,” said Paddy. “This guy I know at work hooked it up.”

“You don’t know her?”

“It’s just a girl. Don’t worry, nothing could happen. I called her before I met you guys and she said it was cool. She sounded all right.” Paddy grinned. “I bet she’s fine, too.”

The way he said fine, like “foyne,” I knew she was a black girl. Paddy had a thing for black chicks, though I don’t think he’d ever had any. Except for that one time, when that girl down at Benny’s Rebel Room jacked him off for forty-five bucks.

“What’re we getting?” I said.

“An eight ball.”

“Shit, Paddy, c’mon.” I had, like, sixteen bucks in my wallet, and next to nothing in the bank.

“I got you, man.”

So he was dealing. Small-time, but there it was. That’s how Paddy always had coke. It was the first time he’d let me know, even if it was in a backdoor way. Because I was still high and feeling bold, it excited me some that he had let me in on his action. Also, I was a little bit scared.

“This your regular connection?”

“Nah, uh-uh, he’s out of town. This is a one-time deal.”

I looked up at the apartments and the grounds. Some of the balconies were sagging, and fast-food trash was strewn about the lot. “Maybe we oughta wait until your man gets back.”

“You wanna get high, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah.” I was at that stage; I was hungry for more.

Paddy threw his head back to drain his can of beer. He lofted the can over his shoulder. It hit some dead soldiers on the floorboard and made a dull metallic sound. I killed mine and dropped the can between my feet.

We got out of the car and walked across the lot. There were a couple of guys wearing mustaches, sitting in a black late-model Ford parked nearby. Their heads were moving to music; the bass was up so loud I could hear it behind the closed windows of their car. I didn’t make eye contact with them or anything. I figured they were doing some blow. Hell, everyone was rocking it back then. They were a little old for it, but it wasn’t any business of mine.

We went up a stairwell, one of those open-air jobs with cinder-block walls. Paddy stopped on the second-floor landing. It was dark when it should have been lit. Then I saw the busted-out lightbulb hung in a cage. I wondered if the girl dealing the blow had deliberately broken the light, made it so you couldn’t see her apartment too good from the parking lot. Paddy knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again.

In a little while, a girl’s voice came forward, muffled over some music that was playing inside the apartment. Paddy put his face close to the door and said his name, and also the name of his coworker at the body shop. The door opened, and Paddy stepped inside. I followed him. The girl stepped back against the wall to let us pass.

The girl was black, on the short side, with all the woman parts in place, including her black girl’s onion. She wore Jordache jeans and a jean shirt unbuttoned kinda low. I could see one of her tits hanging in a loose white bra. She caught me checking her out as I squeezed by. She didn’t seem to care. It was hard to read anything in her hard, unfriendly face and dark, almond-shaped eyes. I didn’t say “hey” to her or smile or anything like it. She took a deep cokehead’s drag off the cigarette she was holding and closed the door.

Paddy put out his hand. “C’mon,” said the girl, ignoring his gesture. We followed her down a short hall.

The music got louder as we walked. It was rap music, some black guy shouting over hard chords of electric guitar. We entered a living room/dining room arrangement, two small rooms, really, separated by nothing, where all the curtains were drawn tight. The place stunk of cigarettes, and smoke hung in the room.

A light-skinned black dude sat on the couch, dragging on a smoke, jonesing for the nicotine like the girl. On the table before the couch was a mirror holding a largish mound of coke heaped beside a single-edged blade. An ashtray sat beside the mirror and was filled with butts. The dude raised his head as we came into the room and sized us up the way guys do. The way he looked at us, you could tell he wasn’t too impressed.

Another black guy, darker skinned with ripped arms, sat at the dining room table. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt to show off his guns. He was rapping along to the guy shouting from the stereo. There was a large amount of cocaine on the table, along with a scale, a big mirror, some blades, plastic Baggies of various sizes, and Snow Seals. The Snow Seals were real, the pharmaceutical kind, not just paper ripped from magazines and folded to size.

The coke was a mountain. I mean, it was Tony Montana big. I’d never seen so much shit before in my life.

A stainless-steel pistol, a short-nosed revolver, sat on the table. The guy touched the grip, turning it just an inch so that the barrel pointed our way. He looked at us, and his eyes were laughing and bright. As the voice came from the stereo, he kept his gaze on us, and shouted along: “It’s like that, and that’s the way it is.”

It’s real clear, even today, what I was thinking: You just got your life started, and this is how you die. All you want to do is get your head up, nothing more than that. You walk into the wrong apartment, there’s guns, and you fucking die.

“You got it?” said Paddy, to the girl. I had to hand it to him. He was acting pretty cool. Knowing Paddy, he was trying to keep himself together to impress her. For a guy who got no play, Paddy was an optimist. He always thought he had a chance.

The girl went and turned down the stereo to almost nothing. The guy at the table kept rapping to the song.

“An eight, right?” said the girl to Paddy.

“That’s right, baby.”

I was thinking, Nah, don’t go there, Paddy. Don’t put on that bullshit black-talk of yours, not here. But she didn’t even blink. She went down another hall and into a kitchen that was visible through a cutout in the dining room wall. I watched her ratfuck through the freezer.

The guy at the table stopped rapping and said, “Y’all want a taste?”

Paddy smiled friendly and put up his hands. “That’s all right,” he said. I’d never seen him turn down a blast of coke.

“Ain’t like I’m asking you to drink out the same bottle as me.”

Paddy chuckled unconvincingly. “It’s not that. I just don’t want any right now.”

“Well, I’m a little surprised, ’cause you look like a pro. Don’t you always check out what you’re buyin?” The guy glanced at the dude sitting on the couch, then back at us. “C’mon over here and give it a road test.”

Paddy shrugged and moved over to the table. I stayed where I was.

The guy at the table dipped a blade into an open Baggie that held some coke. I wondered why he didn’t take it off the Everest that was in front of him. He dumped some powder off the blade and tracked out four thick lines on the mirror without giving it any chop. He handed a short tube of plastic, the cut-down barrel of a Bic pen, to Paddy.

When Paddy leaned over the table to do his lines, his four-leaf clover pendant fell out of his shirt and hung suspended between the zippers of his Members Only jacket.

“Irish, huh?” said the guy.

Paddy said, “All the way.” He did a line and made a show of rearing his head back to take it all in.

“They call me Carlos. What do they call you? ”

“Paddy.”

“No last name?”

“O’Toole.”

“Wow. That damn sure is Irish.” Carlos’s voice was almost musical. “Been to the motherland?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell the truth, man: that can’t be your real name, right?”

“I changed it,” said Paddy, real low. The room was quiet, but you could barely hear him. He bent forward and quickly snorted the other line.

“You’re like, fake Irish, then. That’s what you tellin me?”

Paddy cleared his nostrils with a pinch of his fingers. His eyes narrowed some as he straightened his posture. “I’m Irish.”

Paddy said it real strong, like he was looking to make something of it.

“All the way,” said the guy on the couch.

Carlos looked Paddy over real slow. Then Carlos smiled.

“Plastic Paddy,” said Carlos. The guy on the couch laughed.

Paddy’s face grew pink, like it had gotten at Kildare’s. The girl came back through the hall with a Baggie in her hand and stood near the table. The cigarette still burned between her fingers; it was down to the filter now. Paddy turned to me, his face flushed, and held out the tube. I waved the offer away with my hand.

“Take it,” said Paddy. He sounded kinda mad.

I was frozen. I didn’t want any coke. I was thinking of my parents and my kid sister. I just wanted to get outside.

“What’s the matter with your boy?” said Carlos. “Can’t he find his tongue?”

“Give it to me,” I said to Paddy. The sound of my own voice was a relief. I walked a few steps and took the Bic from Paddy’s outstretched hand. I did the lines fast, one right behind the other, and dropped the plastic tube on the table.

“Here you go, ace,” said the girl, speaking to Paddy. She handed him a Baggie that I guessed she had gotten from the freezer. I could see grains of rice in there with the coke.

“This from the same batch I just did?” said Paddy.

“Yeah,” said Carlos. “It’s good, right?”

Good. It wasn’t even close. I knew right away that this shit was wrong. A curtain had dropped throughout my body, and everything had gotten pushed down into my bowels. I was speeding without the happiness, and I had to take a dump. This was bullshit coke. They had stepped all over it with baby laxative and who knew what else. Paddy had to be feeling the same way I was. He knew he was getting ripped off. It was like the guy was asking, “You don’t mind if I fuck you, do you?”

But Paddy didn’t complain. He reached into his jeans and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed the bills to the girl, who counted out the money with dead eyes.

“Ain’t you gonna weigh it out?” said Carlos, chinning in the direction of the Baggie. “I got a scale right here.”

Paddy didn’t answer. He rolled the Baggie tight and slipped it in the inside pocket of his Members Only.

“You just gonna eyeball it, huh? ” said Carlos.

“Let’s go,” said Paddy. He turned and began to walk. I followed him back down the hall toward the front door. We heard the guy on the couch say, “Plastic Paddy,” in the voice of a game-show host, and then all of them laughed. I didn’t care because it looked like we were going to get out of there alive. But I know Paddy must have been hurting inside, ’cause they’d ripped something out of him. Also, it was the second time he’d been shamed that night.

We took the stairwell down toward the lot. As we crossed the sidewalk, Paddy said, “Fuckin niggers,” and right about then the guys I’d noticed in the Ford came out of nowhere, holding guns on us, shouting at us to lock our hands behind our heads and drop to the asphalt and kiss it. I went down shaking, seeing other men running around in the dark, hearing their adrenalized voices and the screech of tires and the closing of heavy car doors.

As I hit the ground, I lost control of everything and crapped my pants.

You know all those cop shows on TV, where the detectives convince the suspect to talk before the lawyer arrives? It’s bullshit, the worst thing you can do. My father always told me that if I ever got jammed up just to keep my mouth shut and wait for the guys in the suits. Also, ’cause he figured I’d get DWI’d someday, he told me to refuse the breath tests and keep my piss inside me. Judging from what happened to Paddy, I don’t think he ever had any guidance like that. Plus, they gave him some court-appointed attorney who didn’t help his case. My lawyer was a heavy hitter, a friend of my dad’s, and he did me right.

Paddy did a few months’ detention up at Seven Locks, and I got a community service thing where I had to wear a jumpsuit and pick up trash in Sligo Creek Park. Also, I was required to attend these classes at an old Catholic school on Riggs Road, where some horse-faced guy talked about the evils of alcohol and drugs, one night a week for six weeks. It was me and a bunch of losers, alkies and spentheads who’d flip the teacher the bird behind his back when they weren’t drawing sword-and-sorcery artwork in their notebooks or scratching their initials into their desks.

You’d think it was lucky we walked into that bust before something worse happened to us. That I might have looked around me in that rehab class, checked out the company I was keeping, and realized that I needed to turn my life around. But I guess I wasn’t that smart.

Soon after those classes ended, I started doing the occasional blast on weekends again, telling myself it was recreational. Then, big surprise, I began to hunt for it during the week. One night I got drunk and wanted it so bad that I went into a rough neighborhood down in Petworth, off Georgia Avenue in D.C., where this guy in a bar had told me I could cop. I bought a half from some hard-looking black dudes and got knocked out with a lead pipe by the same dudes while I was walking back to my car. I woke up at the Washington Hospital Center, my face looking like a duck’s. I never did another line. My father said that I had to fall down and hit my head to find out I wasn’t normal, and I guess he was right.

Paddy went away after his jail time, to Florida or some shit, and after that I lost contact with him completely. Scott had this theory that Paddy had flipped on Carlos and them and was probably too scared to stay in Maryland. As for Scott, him and me drifted apart.

I saw them both at the twentieth reunion for my high school, held a few years ago at some hotel up in Gaithersburg. Scott was heavy and bald and on his second wife. He mentioned his law firm and something about a new model Lexus he had his eye on. He didn’t really need to boast like that, ’cause I could tell from his suit that he had done all right. But I noticed that most of the night he was standing by himself. Nobody from our high school days seemed to recognize him. Scott had money, but he didn’t have friends.

I caught glimpses of Paddy during the evening, standing near the cash bar or hanging around the buffet table, where most of the food had been picked clean. His image was fuzzy — I was too vain to wear my glasses to the reunion — but I knew from the way he was standing, swaybacked like he’d always been, that it was him. When I’d try to catch his eye, though, he’d look away.

Our paths crossed in the bathroom later that night. I was taking a leak in the urinal when Paddy walked in. I got a good look at him while I zipped up my fly. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and a hat sat crookedly on his head. The hat was one of those plastic derbies, green and covered in cellophane, with shamrocks glued underneath the cellophane. Like something you’d win at a carnival. Paddy’s face was puffy and there were gray bags under his unfocused eyes. He leaned against the wall and looked me up and down.

“Paddy,” I said. “How you doin?”

“Big store manager,” he said, drawing out the words. His lip was curled with contempt.

I figured that someone at the reunion must have told him that I was managing a Radio Shack. But I was doing better than that. I had been promoted to merchandising director, and I was in charge of four stores. Hell, I was knocking down close to forty-two grand a year.

I didn’t correct him, though. I just went to the sink and washed my hands. I washed them real good before I left the room.

Paddy had been my bud for a long time, so I felt kinda bad for a couple days after, seeing him like that. He had taken a long fall. Or maybe, I don’t know, he’d just kept moving sideways. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since, and that suits me fine.

It’s not like I’m denying who I was. I do think about those nights with Paddy, and I know we had some laughs. But for the life of me I can’t tell you what it was we were laughing about. I mean, I used to love to get my head up. But now I can’t remember what was so great about it. Mostly, when I think about it, it seems like it was all a waste of time.