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backdrifterHis encounter with Horace did nothing to stop his bizarre crusade. He singled out obvious twinks at night, screaming derogatory names as he chased them down one block or another in the dead of night, and he picked fights with men who often repaid his unkind words with their fists. He found himself relishing people’s hatred toward him; no, he craved it, though he couldn’t explain it. He sought it out like a drug, no matter the bruises, or the close encounters with the law.
What he couldn’t explain to himself, exactly, was that it wasn’t hatred he craved, but for someone to look beyond his poisonous personality and see him trapped inside of it. He couldn’t realize it, but all his actions were another withdrawal of sorts—a withdrawal from Ryan. Ryan had, in times long gone now, looked past his bully persona and had chosen, in due time, to love him unconditionally, regardless of how he presented himself to others.
He needed that. He needed Ryan.
He became a zombie of the streets, never sleeping because cops wouldn’t let him, never eating because he had no money and couldn’t bring himself to beg. He sat in Tompkins Square Park in daylight hours and dragged his bony knuckles down his ribs to see how many times his hand would jump, and he wondered how long it would be before he would die. He wondered, too, if anyone would recognize his carcass, or if he would just be tagged a John Doe and shoved in a freezer somewhere, or whatever it was they did with the unclaimed dead.
“Is that you, baby boy?” a soft, female voice asked him from overhead as he sat, and he wished hard that it would be Olga, come to rescue him from his own stupid life. And at first, when he looked up, it was Olga he saw. He smiled blearily.
“It’s Tanya,” the voice said, and the mirage dissolved. Tanya was plumper now than the last time he’d seen her, with a small, tight belly rounding out the shape of her jacket. Her mass of hair was tied back in a relaxed ponytail at the base of her neck, and she looked concernedly at him.
“Hi,” he mumbled. Turning his head to look at her made him feel dizzy.
“You look like a mess, babe,” she said, sliding onto the bench next to him. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“I dunno,” he replied honestly, He looked at his feet.
“Respa.”
“Tanya,” he returned.
“If you come with me, I’ll feed you,” she said, but he immediately shook his head, though he just as immediately regretted it.
“I don’t want heroin,” he rasped. “I don’t want PCP. I don’t want sex, I don’t want booze, I don’t want any of that.”
“Then you don’t have to,” she said softly, though she sounded disappointed. “Just come back with me, and…”
“I knew you wanted something,” he said, bitterly, looking away from her.
“Help me take care of the baby,” she finished. “Please, Respa, I can’t take care of this baby alone when it comes.”
“I told you already, it can’t be mine.”
She pulled away angrily. “First of all, yes it can, and it is. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else when I took that pregnancy test. Just you.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Shh! Let me finish! Second of all, what does it matter who the dad is? Can’t you just help an old friend take care of her baby, whether or not you think you fathered it?”
He had nothing to say to that. “I still have to say, though,” he said, “that it can’t be my baby.” She opened her mouth to protest. “Shh! Let me finish. If I come with you, I’ll tell you why when we get to Brooklyn.” He smiled weakly. “I’ll help you, okay?”
She smiled back, her whole demeanor weary but happy. “Fine. I’m still living in Dumbo, but my roommates took off, so it won’t be as crowded, okay?”
“Okay,” he conceded, and she pulled him up by both hands to leave the park.
“You’re like a bird,” she commented as she pulled him up, and he just half-shrugged at her. “Come on, we’re taking the F again.”
When they arrived in the studio, he collapsed on her bed in exhaustion, and fell immediately asleep. He didn’t wake for hours, and when he did, Tanya was sitting in the kitchen area on the floor, leaning against the cabinet. She was eating from a large bag of chips, and when she saw he was awake, she motioned for him to come over.
“Come and eat something,” she said.
He couldn’t get over there fast enough. Although he felt greedy and awful, his overwhelming hunger superceded both of those feelings as he grabbed the bag away from her and stuffed his face with handful after handful. Tanya warned him to slow down, because he was only going to get sick eating so much after such a long fast, but it took her taking the bag away to make him stop. She dug around in the mini fridge and pulled out an apple for him, slightly mealy but still a decent piece of food. He tore into it, his hands cradling it like he thought she might snatch that away, too. She watched him with a somewhat sad but amused look. Really, it was the way a person might look at a stray they’d taken in; silly stray cat, you have nothing to fear now. Your feral actions are meaningless here.
After the apple came more chips, a miniature box of cereal, and two candy bars. Tanya watched him wolf it all down, and then he rolled back into the bed and slept some more. He wasn’t sure how long his luck would last, anymore.
When he awoke, Tanya was on the bed next to him, asleep as well. His hand was clasped in hers, and he slowly removed it before sitting up to just survey his new living situation, and think.
She woke not five minutes after he did, and she sat up as well. “I’m going to have to fatten you up,” she said, touching his jutting pelvic bones, and grazing her fingertips across where she could feel his ribs through his thin shirt.
“It happened last year,” he said quietly, staring at the wall instead of meeting her eye. “There were five guys, and one of them came up to me while the rest were hiding.”
She remained silent.
“The rest were lying in wait, right, and when I told the first guy to fuck off, he signaled them or something and they all came at me.” He swallowed with his eyes closed before continuing. “They dragged me to this warehouse—”
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” Tanya said, trying to be soothing.
“No, I have to,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “I want you to understand this. They dragged me to this warehouse, over on Twelfth, and first they beat the shit out of me.” He held up his left hand. “They didn’t just break the fingers on this hand—they pulverized them. I can’t use the three outer fingers, now, not for anything.” He touched his nose with the index finger of that hand. “They broke my nose, too. The leader used another guy’s cigarette to burn my skin, and then—”
“You don’t—”
“No! No, I have to, because otherwise you’re not going to get this, and you’ll keep telling me things that I can’t ever believe, and we’re both going to feel hurt and be mad at each other and it’s stupid.” He swallowed again. His mouth was like a desert. “He burned my skin, and then he tore off the shorts I was wearing that night with a knife, just straight through the fabric, and…and he leaned forward, and he said, ‘Remember this forever, you disgusting, subhuman freak of nature,’ and then he shoved himself—himself—his cock—” and he didn’t spit the word so much as he vomited it, the memory bringing bile to the top of his throat and making him feel like someone was pouring acid on his brain. “—He shoved it up—up in here—” and he touched the side of his ass quickly, delicately, giving Tanya a push when she glanced downward, “and there was nothing lubricating anything down there, except when he tore something and then my blood was doing the trick, my blood was everywhere.”
She was pressing her hand to her mouth now, tears sliding silently down her cheeks as she listened. “Oh, Respa, oh, god, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry… I didn’t know, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“And then he said he wanted to get something to eat, and he left me there, bleeding and alone.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” She hugged his arm, pressing her wet face against it.
“So you see,” he said, “I can’t possibly be the father of your baby, because after that happened to me, I fucking swore I would never have sex, not ever again. Not willingly, anyway.”
“Baby,” she said quietly, and he heard the rebuttal in her voice before she’d even said it. “You remember how I took you to all those parties?”
“Yeah, of course. I don’t remember the end of half of them, though—” He stopped. A cold feeling spread over his entire body, starting from the base of his skull and traveling outward.
“Those parties you don’t remember the end of… You got so drunk, or so high, I guess, that you didn’t remember, but a lot of the times we’d go into the bedroom of whoever was hosting the party, and if there wasn’t someone in there already, you’d throw me down on the bed and we’d have sex.” He voice was quiet. “You were so good about it, too, except for the times you mumbled a name that wasn’t mine, even though I couldn’t really catch what it was. You were so gentle… So kind.” She touched his face, and he flinched away. “Baby, please.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said, vitriol overflowing from the words, and he tore his arm away from her, standing quickly. “Don’t touch me right now.”
“It wasn’t like you weren’t into it!” she protested, still sitting down on the bed.
“Oh, right, because I was drunk, right? That makes it okay, right?”
“You know what, it’s funny how you’re acting like such a victim, when you’re the one who ran out on me the moment I told you I was pregnant!” She stood now, though she needed to brace herself against the wall to do so.
“I just told you why!”
Her face was crimson as she stared him down, for a moment. Then she flapped her hands by her face, taking deep breaths. “You know what, no. No. I can’t get too angry, it’s bad for the baby. You’re here now, and that’s all that matters.” She composed herself with her eyes closed, her hands miming pulling strings down. “I forgive you.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said in reply. As he turned, all Tanya’s hard work in calming herself down came undone, and she became apopletic, hurling her pillows at his back as she shrieked nonsense.
Living with Tanya was a taxing situation, especially now that she was pregnant. Everything angered her. She ate most of the food, leaving Respa little better off than he had been before, living in the squat. And worst of all, the pregnancy didn’t keep her from shooting her precious heroin.
Normally, Tanya declared everything from high blood pressure to mildly crowded subway cars as being “bad for the baby.” But when she needed a hit, suddenly she changed her tune, saying that the baby was “hardy, like her mom.”
When he pointed out that A, she had no idea what sex the baby would be, and B, a fetus was anything but “hardy,” she focused on his first point and flew into a rage. She called him a sexist pig, and accused him of plotting to kill her baby if it was born a girl. Nothing he said could convince her otherwise for the rest of that day.
With each passing month, Tanya grew bigger and angrier. Respa spent his twentieth birthday hanging outside a Gristedes just to get out of the apartment, and when he got home that night, Tanya threw things at his head the second he stepped through the door.
“You did all my shit!” she screeched. “How are we supposed to make money now?!”
“I didn’t touch your stash,” he said, falling with a weary whumph onto the mattress. “You did it all, you fucking junkie.”
“I—oh.” For once, her rage deflated, and she joined him on the bed. “I did?”
“You did. Get off me.”
She paid his demand no attention, instead staring blankly and chewing her lower lip. “I really don’t know how we’re going to make any money now, though. I don’t think either of us can hold real jobs.”
“How is this place paid for, then? You can’t possibly have been making enough—”
“Oh, stupid kids will pay a premium for heroin they don’t know is shitty,” she said arily, waving the matter away. “But that’s all gone now.”
“Can you buy more?”
“The real shit costs more than we can afford, baby boy.”
“Well, I mean…” He could only think of one more option, but he would rather eat hot shit and die, than voice it.
She voiced it for him. “I think you’re gonna have to go back to work.”
“No.” He barked the word instantly, resolute.
“It’s either that or we starve, and I lose the baby.” She took his hand and laid it on her belly. “I mean, nether of us even have a GED. Please, baby.”
He stared hard at the toes of his boots, and at first he distracted himself by thinking of how he’d had these boots for five years now, and how shitty they’d become. The soles flapped when he walked, one of the toes was crushed, and the heels were so worn down it was like standing on the sides of his feet when he stood still. He could touch his threadbare sock through the heel of one.
Tanya shook him gently, and he knew he had to make a real decision. If he didn’t make a return to his previous line of work, they would both starve, not to mention lose the studio, and Tanya would probably miscarry. The idea of a baby all her own had become Tanya’s raison d’être; she would probably kill herself without hesitation, without it.
“What about your old roommates?” he asked.
“We’re not friends anymore,” she replied bitterly. “They won’t help us.”
If he did go back, though, he would spend every night wracked with fear, just waiting for the blond man to appear around the bend, brass knuckles ready. The nightmares, he was sure, would come back full force.
But those reasons seemed like nothing when pitted against the life of Tanya, and the future life of her baby. Their baby, if she was right. His fears were not important enough. He was not important enough.
“I’ll do it,” he croaked, and she reached around the crush him in a bear hug.
“The baby will thank you when it’s born,” she said with a huge smile, but his stomach was churning. Not a minute later, he jumped up and ran to the bathroom to kneel over the toilet. He threw up until his stomach felt turned inside out, and then he dry-heaved until he collapsed, cracking his chin on the edge of the seat and curling around the base of the toilet, too tired to move.
“You’re not allowed to have morning sickness, too!” was Tanya’s only reaction.
What he couldn’t explain to himself, exactly, was that it wasn’t hatred he craved, but for someone to look beyond his poisonous personality and see him trapped inside of it. He couldn’t realize it, but all his actions were another withdrawal of sorts—a withdrawal from Ryan. Ryan had, in times long gone now, looked past his bully persona and had chosen, in due time, to love him unconditionally, regardless of how he presented himself to others.
He needed that. He needed Ryan.
He became a zombie of the streets, never sleeping because cops wouldn’t let him, never eating because he had no money and couldn’t bring himself to beg. He sat in Tompkins Square Park in daylight hours and dragged his bony knuckles down his ribs to see how many times his hand would jump, and he wondered how long it would be before he would die. He wondered, too, if anyone would recognize his carcass, or if he would just be tagged a John Doe and shoved in a freezer somewhere, or whatever it was they did with the unclaimed dead.
“Is that you, baby boy?” a soft, female voice asked him from overhead as he sat, and he wished hard that it would be Olga, come to rescue him from his own stupid life. And at first, when he looked up, it was Olga he saw. He smiled blearily.
“It’s Tanya,” the voice said, and the mirage dissolved. Tanya was plumper now than the last time he’d seen her, with a small, tight belly rounding out the shape of her jacket. Her mass of hair was tied back in a relaxed ponytail at the base of her neck, and she looked concernedly at him.
“Hi,” he mumbled. Turning his head to look at her made him feel dizzy.
“You look like a mess, babe,” she said, sliding onto the bench next to him. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“I dunno,” he replied honestly, He looked at his feet.
“Respa.”
“Tanya,” he returned.
“If you come with me, I’ll feed you,” she said, but he immediately shook his head, though he just as immediately regretted it.
“I don’t want heroin,” he rasped. “I don’t want PCP. I don’t want sex, I don’t want booze, I don’t want any of that.”
“Then you don’t have to,” she said softly, though she sounded disappointed. “Just come back with me, and…”
“I knew you wanted something,” he said, bitterly, looking away from her.
“Help me take care of the baby,” she finished. “Please, Respa, I can’t take care of this baby alone when it comes.”
“I told you already, it can’t be mine.”
She pulled away angrily. “First of all, yes it can, and it is. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else when I took that pregnancy test. Just you.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Shh! Let me finish! Second of all, what does it matter who the dad is? Can’t you just help an old friend take care of her baby, whether or not you think you fathered it?”
He had nothing to say to that. “I still have to say, though,” he said, “that it can’t be my baby.” She opened her mouth to protest. “Shh! Let me finish. If I come with you, I’ll tell you why when we get to Brooklyn.” He smiled weakly. “I’ll help you, okay?”
She smiled back, her whole demeanor weary but happy. “Fine. I’m still living in Dumbo, but my roommates took off, so it won’t be as crowded, okay?”
“Okay,” he conceded, and she pulled him up by both hands to leave the park.
“You’re like a bird,” she commented as she pulled him up, and he just half-shrugged at her. “Come on, we’re taking the F again.”
When they arrived in the studio, he collapsed on her bed in exhaustion, and fell immediately asleep. He didn’t wake for hours, and when he did, Tanya was sitting in the kitchen area on the floor, leaning against the cabinet. She was eating from a large bag of chips, and when she saw he was awake, she motioned for him to come over.
“Come and eat something,” she said.
He couldn’t get over there fast enough. Although he felt greedy and awful, his overwhelming hunger superceded both of those feelings as he grabbed the bag away from her and stuffed his face with handful after handful. Tanya warned him to slow down, because he was only going to get sick eating so much after such a long fast, but it took her taking the bag away to make him stop. She dug around in the mini fridge and pulled out an apple for him, slightly mealy but still a decent piece of food. He tore into it, his hands cradling it like he thought she might snatch that away, too. She watched him with a somewhat sad but amused look. Really, it was the way a person might look at a stray they’d taken in; silly stray cat, you have nothing to fear now. Your feral actions are meaningless here.
After the apple came more chips, a miniature box of cereal, and two candy bars. Tanya watched him wolf it all down, and then he rolled back into the bed and slept some more. He wasn’t sure how long his luck would last, anymore.
When he awoke, Tanya was on the bed next to him, asleep as well. His hand was clasped in hers, and he slowly removed it before sitting up to just survey his new living situation, and think.
She woke not five minutes after he did, and she sat up as well. “I’m going to have to fatten you up,” she said, touching his jutting pelvic bones, and grazing her fingertips across where she could feel his ribs through his thin shirt.
“It happened last year,” he said quietly, staring at the wall instead of meeting her eye. “There were five guys, and one of them came up to me while the rest were hiding.”
She remained silent.
“The rest were lying in wait, right, and when I told the first guy to fuck off, he signaled them or something and they all came at me.” He swallowed with his eyes closed before continuing. “They dragged me to this warehouse—”
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” Tanya said, trying to be soothing.
“No, I have to,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “I want you to understand this. They dragged me to this warehouse, over on Twelfth, and first they beat the shit out of me.” He held up his left hand. “They didn’t just break the fingers on this hand—they pulverized them. I can’t use the three outer fingers, now, not for anything.” He touched his nose with the index finger of that hand. “They broke my nose, too. The leader used another guy’s cigarette to burn my skin, and then—”
“You don’t—”
“No! No, I have to, because otherwise you’re not going to get this, and you’ll keep telling me things that I can’t ever believe, and we’re both going to feel hurt and be mad at each other and it’s stupid.” He swallowed again. His mouth was like a desert. “He burned my skin, and then he tore off the shorts I was wearing that night with a knife, just straight through the fabric, and…and he leaned forward, and he said, ‘Remember this forever, you disgusting, subhuman freak of nature,’ and then he shoved himself—himself—his cock—” and he didn’t spit the word so much as he vomited it, the memory bringing bile to the top of his throat and making him feel like someone was pouring acid on his brain. “—He shoved it up—up in here—” and he touched the side of his ass quickly, delicately, giving Tanya a push when she glanced downward, “and there was nothing lubricating anything down there, except when he tore something and then my blood was doing the trick, my blood was everywhere.”
She was pressing her hand to her mouth now, tears sliding silently down her cheeks as she listened. “Oh, Respa, oh, god, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry… I didn’t know, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“And then he said he wanted to get something to eat, and he left me there, bleeding and alone.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” She hugged his arm, pressing her wet face against it.
“So you see,” he said, “I can’t possibly be the father of your baby, because after that happened to me, I fucking swore I would never have sex, not ever again. Not willingly, anyway.”
“Baby,” she said quietly, and he heard the rebuttal in her voice before she’d even said it. “You remember how I took you to all those parties?”
“Yeah, of course. I don’t remember the end of half of them, though—” He stopped. A cold feeling spread over his entire body, starting from the base of his skull and traveling outward.
“Those parties you don’t remember the end of… You got so drunk, or so high, I guess, that you didn’t remember, but a lot of the times we’d go into the bedroom of whoever was hosting the party, and if there wasn’t someone in there already, you’d throw me down on the bed and we’d have sex.” He voice was quiet. “You were so good about it, too, except for the times you mumbled a name that wasn’t mine, even though I couldn’t really catch what it was. You were so gentle… So kind.” She touched his face, and he flinched away. “Baby, please.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said, vitriol overflowing from the words, and he tore his arm away from her, standing quickly. “Don’t touch me right now.”
“It wasn’t like you weren’t into it!” she protested, still sitting down on the bed.
“Oh, right, because I was drunk, right? That makes it okay, right?”
“You know what, it’s funny how you’re acting like such a victim, when you’re the one who ran out on me the moment I told you I was pregnant!” She stood now, though she needed to brace herself against the wall to do so.
“I just told you why!”
Her face was crimson as she stared him down, for a moment. Then she flapped her hands by her face, taking deep breaths. “You know what, no. No. I can’t get too angry, it’s bad for the baby. You’re here now, and that’s all that matters.” She composed herself with her eyes closed, her hands miming pulling strings down. “I forgive you.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said in reply. As he turned, all Tanya’s hard work in calming herself down came undone, and she became apopletic, hurling her pillows at his back as she shrieked nonsense.
Living with Tanya was a taxing situation, especially now that she was pregnant. Everything angered her. She ate most of the food, leaving Respa little better off than he had been before, living in the squat. And worst of all, the pregnancy didn’t keep her from shooting her precious heroin.
Normally, Tanya declared everything from high blood pressure to mildly crowded subway cars as being “bad for the baby.” But when she needed a hit, suddenly she changed her tune, saying that the baby was “hardy, like her mom.”
When he pointed out that A, she had no idea what sex the baby would be, and B, a fetus was anything but “hardy,” she focused on his first point and flew into a rage. She called him a sexist pig, and accused him of plotting to kill her baby if it was born a girl. Nothing he said could convince her otherwise for the rest of that day.
With each passing month, Tanya grew bigger and angrier. Respa spent his twentieth birthday hanging outside a Gristedes just to get out of the apartment, and when he got home that night, Tanya threw things at his head the second he stepped through the door.
“You did all my shit!” she screeched. “How are we supposed to make money now?!”
“I didn’t touch your stash,” he said, falling with a weary whumph onto the mattress. “You did it all, you fucking junkie.”
“I—oh.” For once, her rage deflated, and she joined him on the bed. “I did?”
“You did. Get off me.”
She paid his demand no attention, instead staring blankly and chewing her lower lip. “I really don’t know how we’re going to make any money now, though. I don’t think either of us can hold real jobs.”
“How is this place paid for, then? You can’t possibly have been making enough—”
“Oh, stupid kids will pay a premium for heroin they don’t know is shitty,” she said arily, waving the matter away. “But that’s all gone now.”
“Can you buy more?”
“The real shit costs more than we can afford, baby boy.”
“Well, I mean…” He could only think of one more option, but he would rather eat hot shit and die, than voice it.
She voiced it for him. “I think you’re gonna have to go back to work.”
“No.” He barked the word instantly, resolute.
“It’s either that or we starve, and I lose the baby.” She took his hand and laid it on her belly. “I mean, nether of us even have a GED. Please, baby.”
He stared hard at the toes of his boots, and at first he distracted himself by thinking of how he’d had these boots for five years now, and how shitty they’d become. The soles flapped when he walked, one of the toes was crushed, and the heels were so worn down it was like standing on the sides of his feet when he stood still. He could touch his threadbare sock through the heel of one.
Tanya shook him gently, and he knew he had to make a real decision. If he didn’t make a return to his previous line of work, they would both starve, not to mention lose the studio, and Tanya would probably miscarry. The idea of a baby all her own had become Tanya’s raison d’être; she would probably kill herself without hesitation, without it.
“What about your old roommates?” he asked.
“We’re not friends anymore,” she replied bitterly. “They won’t help us.”
If he did go back, though, he would spend every night wracked with fear, just waiting for the blond man to appear around the bend, brass knuckles ready. The nightmares, he was sure, would come back full force.
But those reasons seemed like nothing when pitted against the life of Tanya, and the future life of her baby. Their baby, if she was right. His fears were not important enough. He was not important enough.
“I’ll do it,” he croaked, and she reached around the crush him in a bear hug.
“The baby will thank you when it’s born,” she said with a huge smile, but his stomach was churning. Not a minute later, he jumped up and ran to the bathroom to kneel over the toilet. He threw up until his stomach felt turned inside out, and then he dry-heaved until he collapsed, cracking his chin on the edge of the seat and curling around the base of the toilet, too tired to move.
“You’re not allowed to have morning sickness, too!” was Tanya’s only reaction.