Regret Pt. 3

Make sure you first read part 1 and then part 2 before moving on to this one.

***

Before we finish this up, I think it would be helpful if you have an idea of what our apartment looks like. We live in the College Park apartment complex, which is a relatively new and swanky property on Park Street just North of Regent Street. Our apartment is a four bedroom, three floor kinda deal, and it looks like this, going from the 4th floor to the 3rd to the 2nd (some other dopes live on the first):

Me and Milo share the top (loft) bedroom, which would be awesome for one person but is kind of not so great for two. So what we've done is put our mattresses in our respective closets (if you get out a ruler and measure the closet and compare it to the whole room you can see just how snug a fit we're talking about). I guess it allows us to do our manly things in privacy and peace, whatever they may be. But it gets hot as fuck in there, and sleeping in a closet is no way to live, especially for a gainfully employed new member of the working class such as myself.

The third floor bedrooms are occupied by Bob (#1) , Vic and Vernon (#2) and Joe (#3). Bob is out of town for the weekend.

OK, we may continue.

10:30am Sunday:

I hear something rustling.

It's morning. I'm alive. I don't know anything else. Not my name, not my life story, not whatever unfortunate series of events led me to this place, this dark, musty, sweaty chamber of pain. I'm not even ready to start asking questions yet. I just want something familiar -- a song, a newspaper, a bowl of cereal, an old T-shirt. Something to place me firmly back in the world I once knew.

Where am I? In a bed, good.

Not sure what the noise is, but I must ignore it. My body needs sleep. I am nauseous, achy, dripping with sweat, cotton-mouthed and miserable, and if I don't fall back asleep in the next 20 seconds I'm afraid I might be up for good.

More rustling. At the foot of the bed. Visions start bouncing off the walls of the dark spaces inside my head. Laughs. Everclear. The hospital kids. Telling stories. The long walk home. And that dude. Who was that dude?

"Dude."

Whoever said that must be responsible for the rustling. I can't even crack my eyes to look.

It's about 85 degrees inside my closet, and I'm regretting the decision to move my bed in here in the first place. It was a decision we made for privacy, I guess. To do certain things, I guess. Now I want air -- cool, standard-issue apartment air, and if somebody could give me some I promise I'll never do those things again.

"Dude, wake up."

I now realize that I'm not alone in my tiny closet. There is somebody else in here, as impossible as that seems. It's a dude. He's talking to me from the foot of the bed. I will ignore him. He isn't real.

"Dude, what the hell? You said you would wake me up at 9, man. I gotta go to work," he says. He's not going away.

My eyelids lift slowly, operating on their own. I think I can hear the seal crack as they open.

Kneeling at the foot of the bed is an African-American man who looks pretty much exactly like the guy who was just occupying my drunken half-memories of last night. He's a critical player, then, this fellow. I may as well say hello.

"What's up, man?" I ask. "What time is it?"

The door is cracked and a shard of sunlight is cutting the closet in half. My eyes are directly in the path of that bright sliver, this dude (Lee?) is almost completely in the dark.

"Dude, I gotta get home," he says. "It's like 10:30 already."

I sit up and I couldn't agree more. He needs to go home. Not until he does can I begin to piece things together, to address the unanswered questions: Why is he in my closet? How did I get home? And...Holy...fucking...SHIT... why am I not wearing any pants...or...underwear?

I pull the comforter over my completely naked lower half. Did he see anything? Did he touch anything? Did he...did we...?

More questions, uglier questions, every minute with this guy. Even if you're the most open-minded, love-all-people, to-each-his-own thinker on the block, youturn into Archie Bunker when your ass-cherry is on the line. Immediate ignorant thought #1: Did he screw me, and if so, do I now have HIV? This guy is an alcoholic homosexual drifter, that's gotta be pretty high risk. Yikes.

"Um, dude, can you wait downstairs and I'll be down in a minute?" I ask. I need some time, maybe a lot of time, maybe a lifetime, to pull myself out of this. A minute is a good start. My mood has instantly spiraled from typical hungover depression into potentially life-ruining misery.

"Sure, man, no problem," Lee says. "I'll see you in a few." He gets up, throws the closet door open, and disappears down the stairs.

I wait about 30 seconds to make sure he's gone, then I crawl out of the closet, force my way to my feet and throw on some fresh drawers. I want that to make me feel better but it doesn't. There's too much up in the air right now. I pull on a pair of clean pants and head downstairs to face whatever needs to be faced. My head is throbbing, the entire left side feels like somebody's slapping it with a coconut every three seconds.

By the time I reach the third floor, on my way down to the second, I have assembled some memories to plug into the mystery of last night.

-Dave, Eli, Everclear, Cap Centre Foods
-the dudes running outside to tell me that Lee was gay
-Lee's fierce denial of this possibility

And now waking up pantsless on Saturday morning.

I get downstairs to floor 2 and none of my roommates are around. Just Lee, pacing and smoking a cigarette. He sees me.

"So what did you say your name was?" he asks.

"Hans," I say. "You're Lee, right?"

"Yeah. Listen, can I get like ten bucks so I can get a taxi home? I'm like two hours late for work already."

"Sure, man. Hang on."

I run back upstairs and like a fucking miracle my wallet is neatly placed on top of my dresser, a moment of apparent lucidity in a night of tremendous mistakes. I open it and there's six dollars inside. That'll have to do. Six bucks to shuffle this dude out of the apartment and hopefully into obscurity forever. Seems more than reasonable.

I get back downstairs and I tell him that it's all I have.

"Thanks man. I guess I'll see ya later," he says.

"Yeah, take care," I say, which seems about right.

He's out the door and I lock it behind him. I lean against it.

What happened and is there anybody who knows? Do I want to find out?

It's all very important, but right now nothing is as important as sleep. I go up to my room, but for some reason I can't bring myself to lay back down in that closet. It's as if that three by seven space is my own little crime scene. I stare out the window instead. It's a gray and miserable day, but the dudes across the street working at Schmidt's Auto don't care. They've got some poor schmuck's car up on the lift, blasting his stereo, and soon they'll probably rifle through his glove compartment and rob him like they did to Vic a couple years ago. Stole some CD's right out of his Chevy Cavalier. Today the boys at Schmidt's are happy. Today whatever sins they've committed and whatever sins have been committed upon them are in the past. Today they're working smoothly as a unit, singing along with Journey and .38 Special and taking pleasure in an honest day's work.

I think I'd like to trade places with one of them. Right now, straight up, no questions asked. I can learn on the job. Send Larry up here to straighten out all my bullshit.

I slink back into my closet, lay down, and fight back a surge of nausea. I put my head down on the pillow and after at least an hour of trying in vain to clear my head of all thought, I fall asleep.

***

2:45 pm

I wake up and I can hear my roommates laughing downstairs. I'm pretty sure they're laughing at me. I need to head down to face whatever's coming.

laugh laugh laugh (inaudible joke) laugh laugh laugh laugh (inaudible response) laugh laugh laugh I enter the room total silence.

In the room are me, Milo, Max, Vic, Joe, Vernon, and Clyde.

"What's up fellas?" I say, innocently enough.

"There he is. THERE HE IS!" says Vernon.

Vernon's a bit of a Goody Two Shoes. We used to be better friends, in fact he's the one who got us this apartment in the first place. Now he spends most nights here on the couch with his Goody Two Shoes girlfriend. Our relationship soured when he ratted me out to our landlord after I broke the neighbors' door one drunken night by throwing my buddy Carl against it during a fake fight. It cost me $275. For all I know the door was already broken. Fucking Goody Two Shoes.

I figure we may as well get to it.

"So, what happened?" I ask, physically bracing myself for the response.

"Well, how much do you remember?" Milo asks.

By this point I remember all that I'm gonna remember. It's pretty much this and this and now this. I patiently go through a Cliffs Notes version for them, everything I know about last night.

"No offense man, but this is out of control," Vernon says. "You guys have done some pretty stupid things, but who the hell was that dude you brought home last night? I mean, this isn't just your place, it's all of ours."

What the fuck does that mean? Is he mad that I brought a stranger back to our apartment? Or is he mad that I brought a black stranger back to our apartment? I'm already feeling defensive, like I have to stick up for Lee's honor. Like he was my fucking girlfriend.

"What's the big deal?" I ask, just now realizing that this is the first time in my life when I awoke to find a strange person in my bed, and it was a dude. "We were just having fun."

This last part is pure speculation on my part. And still it sits in the air for a minute, probably meaning more than I meant it to.

"I missed most of it," Milo says. "But these guys have been filling me in on all the action. Sounds like you definitely did have fun."

OK, screw all these sarcastic hints, I need to know what happened.

"Alright, let's hear it...what happened after we got home?"

"Well, I was up drinking a beer and watching a movie when you rolled in around 4," Vic says. "You and your friend -- Lee? -- came in talking a mile a minute, completely blotto. I was still a little drunk myself, so I was actually excited to try to keep the night going. I got us some beers out of the fridge and turned on the stereo --"

"Loud. Really loud," Vernon interjects. "I was sleeping and all of a sudden I hear this awful music blasting from downstairs. Was it Billy Idol?"

"Yeah, Vital Idol," Vic continues. "We were rocking out to Billy Idol. Your friend Lee started talking all sorts of shit about not being gay. I was like, 'Whatever' and I pretty much ignored him. The music was really loud and everyone was sort of in their own world."

"I came downstairs and told you guys to turn it down, and Hans, you told me to go fuck myself if I couldn't appreciate Billy Idol and Old Milwaukee at 4 in the morning with no work the next day," Vernon says.

"Sorry," I say, not sorry.

"Yeah, after Vern went back upstairs, Joe and Max and Clyde came downstairs and joined us," Vic says.

It's amazing to me that Max and Clyde would choose to stay over at our apartment when they each have their own apartments across campus, with safe warm individual beds.

"We all came down and we were having the stupidest conversation," Max says. "This guy Lee kept insisting that he wasn't gay and he kept sort of half-challenging us to physical confrontations, like he had something to prove. Then he'd back off and put his arm around ya and pay you ridiculous compliments out of the blue, like, 'Man, that's a nice shirt.'"

"Hans, man, then you got all tired and went upstairs to bed," Clyde says. "You just left us downstairs with this dude, like he was our reponsibility."

For a moment, I am relieved. It seems my role in the story is complete. I went upstairs and passed out. No big deal. This is good news.

Then I remember that there has to be a chain of events that leads Lee from the living room into my closet where I found him earlier today.

"Eventually, we all went to bed. I crashed in Bob's room, because he's out of town," Max says. "I was sleeping for a while when I heard the door open and I saw a figure enter the room and climb into bed with me. It was Lee. It didn't seem like that big a deal -- we're always sleeping in the same bed because there are too many guys. Plus I was just so tired I couldn't bother to care. Still, I wasn't happy about it and I told him to stay on his side of the bed. He made some homophobic comment like, "You think I'm a fag?" and I just rolled over and went to sleep. Then I woke up a little while later because he was giving me a fucking backrub. I was freaked out, but I was so comatose that I just swatted his hands away and told him he better cut that shit out. He stopped and tried to make a joke out of it, and somehow I fell back asleep. But a light sleep, you know? What must have been at least an hour later I rolled over and the dude was just staring at me like a fucking snake staring at a mouse. Eyes wide open. He didn't say a word. I just got up and left and slept downstairs."

This isn't good, I'm thinking. Somehow Lee got up from that nice pristine bed that Max bequeathed him and he made it up into my closet by 10:30.

"I got up around 8 this morning and he was downstairs watching TV," Milo says. "I had no fucking idea who he was, and frankly I was nervous as hell. Then he told me he was your friend and he had to go to work soon. He didn't know your name, he just kept calling you 'the funny guy' and calling Max 'the Jewish guy.' He seemed nice enough. I had some cereal and then I went back to bed. He was still down there."

"So...did anybody see what the dude did between when Max left him in the bed and when Milo ran into him this morning? Or after Milo went back to bed?" I asked.

"Why?" Clyde asks.

"Well, when I woke up this morning he was laying in my closet with me," I say.

"Dooood," Vic says, laughing. "I think you guys did it."

I don't even have the guts to tell them that I didn't have any underwear on when I woke up. After all, in my head I've already explained that. I ditched the underwear out the window at Dave's place the night before, therefore when I got home and stripped off my drinking pants to pass out, I had nothing on underneath. Of course I was too drunk to go put on a pair of pajamas.

"That's not funny," I say. "This dude was like a predator. What if I passed out and he...did things to me?"

"You know what? That's possible," Joe says, emerging from a game of Tecmo to join the conversation. "We came up there this morning around 9 to see if you wanted to go get breakfast with us at the Regent Street Retreat and you weren't fucking budging. We were slapping you in the head, shaking you, the works. You didn't respond at all."

"Um...when you came in...did I have any underwear on?" I ask.

"Dude, I assume so, the blanket was on you...why? Did you have any on when you woke up?"

"No, but I shit myself earlier in the night, so that might explain it..." I trailed off. I don't think I'm winning any hearts and minds with this line of thinking. Imagine a scenario when the best plausible explanation for where you find yourself is that you crapped your pants. That's where I am.

"Hans, if that dude had sex with you, I'm pretty sure you'd know it," Milo says, and I value his opinion because he will one day be a doctor. "Like, your ass would be sore as hell." I wonder if he will ever use these words with a future patient. Like, your ass would be sore as hell.

I take stock of my ass soreness. Sore, to be sure. But not any sorer than any other night of excessive alcoholism. I convince myself that he didn't bone me.

"He probably just blew you," Clyde says.

I decide right then to work something out with God. God, I can accept that the dude blew me, if that's what you want to throw my way. No problem. Just agree that there was no anal sex and no HIV please. Hell, even anal sex is OK as long as you promise no HIV. Is that OK? I promise no more drinking. No drinking, no HIV. Deal?

No word from God, but I'm keeping my side of the bargain.

***

Lee calls the next day, speaking in his toughest, most manly voice. He leaves a message:

"Yo Hans. We're having a big party next Saturday. Tons of chicks. Many kegs. You and your boys should come out. Give me a call. Alright, Peace."

I don't call him back.