Post by Robin on Jul 1, 2006 8:49:59 GMT -8
More Marty stuff. This one focuses on Sid, may it do ya fine.
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Sid had always seemed so indestructible. He never seemed vulnerable at all, not even when he was in the throes of delirious laughter, snot running out of his nose. I can’t remember him ever being sad or depressed or any other synonym for the feeling, not even when his date to junior prom, Cynthia Swanson, stood him up for Robert Dolman. He just took his sister along. I think maybe that was why we were all so traumatized that day in the park when Sid passed out. You expected Chris Stevens to get into fights; you expected Robert Dolman to get into fights; you expected Wyatt Dreier to pass out, not Sid. But then, Sid had always been all about doing the opposite of what others thought he would do, or of bringing about a result that nobody had really expected. And really, nobody expected anything bad to happen at a park, anyways. It was a park, for god’s sake, and what could a park be except for benign? Walking there, with Sid attempting cartwheels around us and with Marty grinning like an idiot, it didn’t seem that it could be. Like the cumulus clouds resting in the sky like bloated sheep, the allure outweighed the possible danger of it. We would not have stayed at home just because those bloated sheep seemed to be getting a little dingy around the edges, so we would not have stayed away from the park just because there were other people there. A mother or nanny taking a baby for a walk in a stroller didn’t pose any immediate threat; nor did a group of ‘shady’ looking young men loitering around. It was the park.
As Sid finally managed to perform a cartwheel, Marty grabbed his foot so he couldn’t go full cycle.
“How long can you stay like that?” he asked, slowly letting go of his foot.
“Forever!” Sid crowed jubilantly, even as he tilted and fell flat on his back. Wyatt and Carolyn stopped whispering to each other for a few moments to look over and snort at the sight of Sid, cross-eyed in staring in his own personal parody of death, and Chris poked at his inert form with the toe of his sneaker.
“Get up, candy ass,” he said, amiably enough. “Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum are coming to ask if they can utilize your asshole.” He pointed to a group of ‘shady’ young men who were making their way over to us with the slow, slouching walk that college drop-outs trying desperately to reassert their manhood will use. I don’t think they were college dropouts, but they walked like them, and that can be enough, at times, to categorize them as such.
“Don’t they know they can get some weird parasite from doing dead dudes?” Sid asked, his voice carrying the patronizing undertones of a schoolteacher’s. He got up, using Chris’s proffered hand so heavily that he almost tugged the blonde boy down. When Sid was up, Chris glared daggers at him, rubbing at his wrist, and Sid placed a pinky to the corner of his mouth in an eerily accurate imitation of Shirley Temple, curtsying and rolling his eyes, grinning. He was still grinning when Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum stopped in front of us.
“Is your friend all right?” the tallest of them, Fee, asked. Chris opened his mouth to reply, but before he could Sid had hopped forwards and grabbed Fee’s hand and was pumping it up and down vigorously.
“Right foine, I am, aye, and what aboot yerself, me foine man?” He was leering hideously, and I had difficulty containing my laughter. Marty elbowed me in the ribs to get me to shut up, but he was ‘coughing’ into his fist, and from the subtle up-and-down movement of his eyes I knew it was Sid’s failure to relinquish his grip on Fee’s hand that had sparked this. Sid slowly let go of the other boy’s hand, eyeing him up and down. “Ye don’t look so foine, ye ken,” he said, the leer fading.
“How do I look then?” Fee demanded.
Sid sighed, and we could see him tucking away his Irishman’s voice for later use. “You look like a…like a…” He paused, trailing off as if it pained him to be so devastatingly honest, then just burst out with it. “Like a wild boar somebody trained for the circus!” The insult itself was not very cutting; it was how he delivered it that caused us and even Fie, Foe, and Fum to laugh appreciatively.
“Today might not be so boring, anyways, Aaron,” Fie said, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Shush, Dean,” Aaron said absently, but there was also a smile playing about his lips. That smile made me uneasy, and I tapped Marty’s arm to get his attention, but he just punched me in the arm hard enough to make me wince and glare at him. Wyatt wrapped his arm around Carolyn’s waist and frowned.
“Why is it always us?” I thought I heard him whisper, but it was faint and he could have said anything.
After a few moments of silence during which Aaron’s smile grew broader, Sid tapped his foot impatiently and gave an exaggerated sigh. “If it takes you that long to devise an evil plan, you have no right slouching around like Evel Knievel or somebody.” Chris punched him in the arm, scowling, but he ignored him, as usual.
Aaron shook his head, and I noticed his hands clench into fists. Sid was being particularly annoying; not cutting or anything like that, but annoying. It was what he did, and what he did best. He even irritated us at times, and we tuned him out, but it never seemed to hurt him. He would just return to his task with renewed vigor the next opportunity he got. He was like elastic. And yet, the next lines Fee/Aaron spoke seemed to rob him of that elasticity, at least temporarily.
“If you don’t shut your little trap for awhile, you fag, I may have to shut it for you.” Sid shut his little trap, opened it, shut it, and then opened it again.
“I’m not a fag, Kit is!” The words were blurted out in the helpless way that everything else Sid said was, except most every other time the way he said things suggested that no matter how you responded, he would respond with something even snappier. There was something vulnerable about the way he said that fateful phrase that left Chris wide-eyed and Marty shaking his head and Wyatt and Carolyn silent, for once. There was nothing any of us could say to counteract the statement, because, all vulgarities aside, it was completely true. And somehow, the way things seemed to work out that summer (“Ka,” a certain Roland Deschain of Gilead would have said, to which most all of us would have replied as Eddie Dean of New York: “Kaka”), Fee/Aaron threw a punch, and not at me, at Sid. Tensed as he must have been for something like that to happen, the shock of it knocked him off balance and almost to the ground; he managed to lift himself up to normal height and take his hand away from his cheekbone, where I could see a vicious bruise already budding. There was a momentary pause, an inhaling of breath, and then we had all fallen on each other in the violent, devil-may-care practice of rabid coyotes, or wild pigs, or bull elephants in musth.
I don’t know who I hit only that the ratio of defense to offense was about fifty/fifty. For every punch I dealt out, I can recall another landing somewhere on me, the most painful a hit on my collarbone that sent me stumbling back and to the left. In short, it was a blur, with the only clear thing being the ending, where Fee/Aaron knocked Sid’s feet out from under him and sent him crashing down onto the fountain that had once been the park’s crowning glory. There was a loud crack – and loud would be an understatement; deafening would be an understatement – and then all other sounds ceased immediately. It was as though the crack truly was deafening, and all sense of hearing had been lost to everybody.
“Sh-shit,” somebody said weakly, and then Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum were gone, either unwilling to see what would happen if Sid had been hurt badly or unwilling to intrude on a group of friends. Either way, they were gone, and we were alone with Sid slumped against a fountain with his face pale and ashy and his eyes half-open.
Chris was the first to kneel down next to him. He whispered his name frantically, slapping at his face gently, and finally Sid’s eyes opened a smidgen more.
“Shit,” he said in an unwitting imitation of the first person to say it earlier, his voice the feeble, trembling voice of a very old man.
“Can you stand?” Chris asked anxiously, and we all bent in closer to hear the verdict.
“I could,” he grumped, “If you weren’t all hovering over me. What are you, the Jetsons, now?” Obligingly, we stepped back, and Chris heaved Sid to his feet.
“You don’t look so hot,” Wyatt said, and Carolyn nodded her assent.
“Awful,” she added, hiccupping into her hand. Her nails flashed a lovely sea green color in the cloudy gray light; that I remember with intense clarity.
“I don’t feel so hot,” Sid allowed, using one hand to support himself on the fountain and the other to feel at his head gingerly. And then, promptly, he swooped around and vomited on the gravel surrounding the fountain. I tried not to watch; I had always told myself that watching people in such a vulnerable state as puking was rude and, what’s more, sadistic, but I couldn’t help myself. It was fascinating the way the muscles in his jaw and throat worked as he choked and coughed, the fruits of his labor bringing up, at first, what seemed like a gallon of white, chunky puke that looked too much like clam chowder for comfort, and then, as his stomach emptied, ropy tangles of mucus mixed with the last few dregs of its contents.
“As if I need another reason to hate clam chowder,” I murmured softly. Marty looked at me sharply, his eyes flashing in that dangerous gray-to-blue way that meant he was perfectly at ease with giving me an earful if I was trying to be cute at a time like this, but he must have seen on my face that I didn’t mean to say it at all, and turned back to Sid, who was leaning heavily on Chris, his eyelids drooping.
“Don’ feel so hot,” he mumbled again, his voice becoming more unclear. He turned his head to look at Chris, who was frowning. “An’ whass your prollem, uh?”
“Your ear is bleeding,” Chris said, his voice trembling but the words the clearest I had heard anybody ever speak.
Sid frowned and reached up a hand to touch his ear. The furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he pulled his hand away and held them in front of his eyes, swaying slightly. “Fancy tha’” he said, forgetting to tack on a bad British accent, and fainted. He would have fallen to the ground if Chris had not caught him and lowered him gently to the ground, kneeling down as he did so and holding Sid’s head in his lap. Marty stood there gaping like a fish for what seemed like eternity, and then I grabbed hold of his shoulders and shook him, hard, hissing his name through teeth I had clenched over the pain that had settled in my lower gut. He blinked rapidly and almost lost his balance for a moment, and then seemed to gain his senses.
“I’ll go call an ambulance,” he said, and raced off to the payphone. I heard him babbling into it incoherently and almost smiled at the thought of the operator telling him to please slow down, sir. And soon, the ambulance came, and Sid was being loaded into the ambulance, and Wyatt was saying he’d pay for a cab for us all to go to the hospital, ‘cause Carolyn wanted to walk home; she wasn’t feeling well. We all agreed, Chris rather hollowly, and in what seemed like a few blurred moments we were lounging around the waiting room, just four kids bothering the other waiters with our drumming fingers and tapping feet and voices thickening as mucus does in the throat in the few crummy days before a cold clears up completely and everything is as it should be. We sat there, thinking of nothing in particular except Sid; Sid, crashing down onto the fountain with that sound that could weigh worlds; Sid, blurry-eyed and mumbling, not eloquent at all but still frighteningly charming; Sid, lying pale and ashen on Chris’s lap, a dribble of blood leaking out of his visible ear, a trickle coming out of one nostril, a trickle that we hoped to God was from a punch to the nose and not the crack to his head, even though his face was unmarked except for that trickle of blood and his nose looked like it always had.
At some point, I figured that hoping to God might not be such a bad thing, I began reciting as many Hail Marys as I thought I could under my breath, except when it was so low-pitched my Marys began to sound like Martys, and after it had been going on for a few moments I decided that Marty was as good as Mary and ran with it, a thought that somehow filled me with adrenaline should Marty find out that Mary had been replaced, at least temporarily, by him. And apparently the adrenaline showed, because eventually I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder and jumped about an inch out of my seat and opened my eyes so wide it felt that they must refuse to yield any wider and would resort to popping out.
“What?” I asked, rather stupidly, and he smiled the sad smile that was the most any of us could muster.
“You’re shaking. And muttering something. I was going to ask if something was wrong.”
“Really?” My voice sounded empty and false to my own ears.
“Yeah. You have been since Sid played dead earlier.” At that statement a cold lump of ice settled somewhere in my stomach and transferred the contents of said stomach to my esophagus.
“Oh, God,” I said thickly, and got out of my seat as quickly as possible, racing off to the bathroom with Marty’s questioning eyes burning on my back.
In the bathroom, I didn’t even look for a stall that was clean. I just slid down on my knees in front of it and emptied my stomach on it, vomiting a substance that was, thankfully, nothing like the chowder Sid had projected earlier. I lowered the lid, grateful that the toilets here had any lid at all, and rested my head on it, cooling my face against the ceramic, allowing my heart to stop fluttering frantically like some bird that just discovered what it meant to be in a cage. As a sense of normalcy returned to my bodily functions, I begin to think clearly again, no more Mary/Marty mix ups, no more clam chowder nightmares. And, for once, there were no prayers or Semisonic lyrics. There was Slow Motion; Third Eye Blind. I couldn’t say exactly why it was that it was a Third Eye Blind song that came to my mind at that time, but the closest I could come is to say that I thought of Semisonic and prayers on days that were reserved for Marty. That day was Sid’s, so, Sid’s music would come to mind. And, if that wasn’t it, maybe it was that Semisonic music just isn’t fucked up enough to sum it all up. If anything was fucked up, it was that tauntingly slow, melodious song, Slow Motion. And so lyrics from Slow Motion came to my mind. See my neighbor’s beating his wife because he hates his life, there’s a knock to his fist as he swings; oh man what a beautiful thing. Hadn’t there been a sort of warped beauty to the fight? A blur, rose-tinted by the mind’s defense mechanisms; wasn’t that one of the most lovely things ever? At the time, it seemed so. And then, As death slides close to me, won’t grow old to be a junkie wino creep, wasn’t that Sid’s life in a nutshell? Marty’s mom would always say how Sid would grow up to be a heroin junkie. It always struck me as odd how she had said he would be a heroin junkie, seeing as we all smoked pot, but later, after reading and watching and learning the rhythms of life, I could see how it could happen. All it needed was the discovery that a new kind of drug provided a better high than either pot or the humor he clung so closely to, and he was done in. Eddie Dean of New York could have said as much, courtesy of Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
And eventually, the ceramic grew warm beneath my cheek and I stood up, stretching my legs, which had gone to sleep. I stumbled back into the waiting room, feeling washed-out and emptied-out and still terribly shitty about Sid, but overall, better. When I sat back down Marty leaned over to tell me in a low voice that the doctor said that Sid had had a brain hemorrhage, but it had been minor and he’d probably be fine; they were keeping him on drugs to prevent seizures until they were sure all the danger was past. And as I nodded, the trembling wavered in my limbs. It came back, of course, strong as ever, but it wavered.
By Sid, it wavered.
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Sid had always seemed so indestructible. He never seemed vulnerable at all, not even when he was in the throes of delirious laughter, snot running out of his nose. I can’t remember him ever being sad or depressed or any other synonym for the feeling, not even when his date to junior prom, Cynthia Swanson, stood him up for Robert Dolman. He just took his sister along. I think maybe that was why we were all so traumatized that day in the park when Sid passed out. You expected Chris Stevens to get into fights; you expected Robert Dolman to get into fights; you expected Wyatt Dreier to pass out, not Sid. But then, Sid had always been all about doing the opposite of what others thought he would do, or of bringing about a result that nobody had really expected. And really, nobody expected anything bad to happen at a park, anyways. It was a park, for god’s sake, and what could a park be except for benign? Walking there, with Sid attempting cartwheels around us and with Marty grinning like an idiot, it didn’t seem that it could be. Like the cumulus clouds resting in the sky like bloated sheep, the allure outweighed the possible danger of it. We would not have stayed at home just because those bloated sheep seemed to be getting a little dingy around the edges, so we would not have stayed away from the park just because there were other people there. A mother or nanny taking a baby for a walk in a stroller didn’t pose any immediate threat; nor did a group of ‘shady’ looking young men loitering around. It was the park.
As Sid finally managed to perform a cartwheel, Marty grabbed his foot so he couldn’t go full cycle.
“How long can you stay like that?” he asked, slowly letting go of his foot.
“Forever!” Sid crowed jubilantly, even as he tilted and fell flat on his back. Wyatt and Carolyn stopped whispering to each other for a few moments to look over and snort at the sight of Sid, cross-eyed in staring in his own personal parody of death, and Chris poked at his inert form with the toe of his sneaker.
“Get up, candy ass,” he said, amiably enough. “Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum are coming to ask if they can utilize your asshole.” He pointed to a group of ‘shady’ young men who were making their way over to us with the slow, slouching walk that college drop-outs trying desperately to reassert their manhood will use. I don’t think they were college dropouts, but they walked like them, and that can be enough, at times, to categorize them as such.
“Don’t they know they can get some weird parasite from doing dead dudes?” Sid asked, his voice carrying the patronizing undertones of a schoolteacher’s. He got up, using Chris’s proffered hand so heavily that he almost tugged the blonde boy down. When Sid was up, Chris glared daggers at him, rubbing at his wrist, and Sid placed a pinky to the corner of his mouth in an eerily accurate imitation of Shirley Temple, curtsying and rolling his eyes, grinning. He was still grinning when Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum stopped in front of us.
“Is your friend all right?” the tallest of them, Fee, asked. Chris opened his mouth to reply, but before he could Sid had hopped forwards and grabbed Fee’s hand and was pumping it up and down vigorously.
“Right foine, I am, aye, and what aboot yerself, me foine man?” He was leering hideously, and I had difficulty containing my laughter. Marty elbowed me in the ribs to get me to shut up, but he was ‘coughing’ into his fist, and from the subtle up-and-down movement of his eyes I knew it was Sid’s failure to relinquish his grip on Fee’s hand that had sparked this. Sid slowly let go of the other boy’s hand, eyeing him up and down. “Ye don’t look so foine, ye ken,” he said, the leer fading.
“How do I look then?” Fee demanded.
Sid sighed, and we could see him tucking away his Irishman’s voice for later use. “You look like a…like a…” He paused, trailing off as if it pained him to be so devastatingly honest, then just burst out with it. “Like a wild boar somebody trained for the circus!” The insult itself was not very cutting; it was how he delivered it that caused us and even Fie, Foe, and Fum to laugh appreciatively.
“Today might not be so boring, anyways, Aaron,” Fie said, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Shush, Dean,” Aaron said absently, but there was also a smile playing about his lips. That smile made me uneasy, and I tapped Marty’s arm to get his attention, but he just punched me in the arm hard enough to make me wince and glare at him. Wyatt wrapped his arm around Carolyn’s waist and frowned.
“Why is it always us?” I thought I heard him whisper, but it was faint and he could have said anything.
After a few moments of silence during which Aaron’s smile grew broader, Sid tapped his foot impatiently and gave an exaggerated sigh. “If it takes you that long to devise an evil plan, you have no right slouching around like Evel Knievel or somebody.” Chris punched him in the arm, scowling, but he ignored him, as usual.
Aaron shook his head, and I noticed his hands clench into fists. Sid was being particularly annoying; not cutting or anything like that, but annoying. It was what he did, and what he did best. He even irritated us at times, and we tuned him out, but it never seemed to hurt him. He would just return to his task with renewed vigor the next opportunity he got. He was like elastic. And yet, the next lines Fee/Aaron spoke seemed to rob him of that elasticity, at least temporarily.
“If you don’t shut your little trap for awhile, you fag, I may have to shut it for you.” Sid shut his little trap, opened it, shut it, and then opened it again.
“I’m not a fag, Kit is!” The words were blurted out in the helpless way that everything else Sid said was, except most every other time the way he said things suggested that no matter how you responded, he would respond with something even snappier. There was something vulnerable about the way he said that fateful phrase that left Chris wide-eyed and Marty shaking his head and Wyatt and Carolyn silent, for once. There was nothing any of us could say to counteract the statement, because, all vulgarities aside, it was completely true. And somehow, the way things seemed to work out that summer (“Ka,” a certain Roland Deschain of Gilead would have said, to which most all of us would have replied as Eddie Dean of New York: “Kaka”), Fee/Aaron threw a punch, and not at me, at Sid. Tensed as he must have been for something like that to happen, the shock of it knocked him off balance and almost to the ground; he managed to lift himself up to normal height and take his hand away from his cheekbone, where I could see a vicious bruise already budding. There was a momentary pause, an inhaling of breath, and then we had all fallen on each other in the violent, devil-may-care practice of rabid coyotes, or wild pigs, or bull elephants in musth.
I don’t know who I hit only that the ratio of defense to offense was about fifty/fifty. For every punch I dealt out, I can recall another landing somewhere on me, the most painful a hit on my collarbone that sent me stumbling back and to the left. In short, it was a blur, with the only clear thing being the ending, where Fee/Aaron knocked Sid’s feet out from under him and sent him crashing down onto the fountain that had once been the park’s crowning glory. There was a loud crack – and loud would be an understatement; deafening would be an understatement – and then all other sounds ceased immediately. It was as though the crack truly was deafening, and all sense of hearing had been lost to everybody.
“Sh-shit,” somebody said weakly, and then Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum were gone, either unwilling to see what would happen if Sid had been hurt badly or unwilling to intrude on a group of friends. Either way, they were gone, and we were alone with Sid slumped against a fountain with his face pale and ashy and his eyes half-open.
Chris was the first to kneel down next to him. He whispered his name frantically, slapping at his face gently, and finally Sid’s eyes opened a smidgen more.
“Shit,” he said in an unwitting imitation of the first person to say it earlier, his voice the feeble, trembling voice of a very old man.
“Can you stand?” Chris asked anxiously, and we all bent in closer to hear the verdict.
“I could,” he grumped, “If you weren’t all hovering over me. What are you, the Jetsons, now?” Obligingly, we stepped back, and Chris heaved Sid to his feet.
“You don’t look so hot,” Wyatt said, and Carolyn nodded her assent.
“Awful,” she added, hiccupping into her hand. Her nails flashed a lovely sea green color in the cloudy gray light; that I remember with intense clarity.
“I don’t feel so hot,” Sid allowed, using one hand to support himself on the fountain and the other to feel at his head gingerly. And then, promptly, he swooped around and vomited on the gravel surrounding the fountain. I tried not to watch; I had always told myself that watching people in such a vulnerable state as puking was rude and, what’s more, sadistic, but I couldn’t help myself. It was fascinating the way the muscles in his jaw and throat worked as he choked and coughed, the fruits of his labor bringing up, at first, what seemed like a gallon of white, chunky puke that looked too much like clam chowder for comfort, and then, as his stomach emptied, ropy tangles of mucus mixed with the last few dregs of its contents.
“As if I need another reason to hate clam chowder,” I murmured softly. Marty looked at me sharply, his eyes flashing in that dangerous gray-to-blue way that meant he was perfectly at ease with giving me an earful if I was trying to be cute at a time like this, but he must have seen on my face that I didn’t mean to say it at all, and turned back to Sid, who was leaning heavily on Chris, his eyelids drooping.
“Don’ feel so hot,” he mumbled again, his voice becoming more unclear. He turned his head to look at Chris, who was frowning. “An’ whass your prollem, uh?”
“Your ear is bleeding,” Chris said, his voice trembling but the words the clearest I had heard anybody ever speak.
Sid frowned and reached up a hand to touch his ear. The furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he pulled his hand away and held them in front of his eyes, swaying slightly. “Fancy tha’” he said, forgetting to tack on a bad British accent, and fainted. He would have fallen to the ground if Chris had not caught him and lowered him gently to the ground, kneeling down as he did so and holding Sid’s head in his lap. Marty stood there gaping like a fish for what seemed like eternity, and then I grabbed hold of his shoulders and shook him, hard, hissing his name through teeth I had clenched over the pain that had settled in my lower gut. He blinked rapidly and almost lost his balance for a moment, and then seemed to gain his senses.
“I’ll go call an ambulance,” he said, and raced off to the payphone. I heard him babbling into it incoherently and almost smiled at the thought of the operator telling him to please slow down, sir. And soon, the ambulance came, and Sid was being loaded into the ambulance, and Wyatt was saying he’d pay for a cab for us all to go to the hospital, ‘cause Carolyn wanted to walk home; she wasn’t feeling well. We all agreed, Chris rather hollowly, and in what seemed like a few blurred moments we were lounging around the waiting room, just four kids bothering the other waiters with our drumming fingers and tapping feet and voices thickening as mucus does in the throat in the few crummy days before a cold clears up completely and everything is as it should be. We sat there, thinking of nothing in particular except Sid; Sid, crashing down onto the fountain with that sound that could weigh worlds; Sid, blurry-eyed and mumbling, not eloquent at all but still frighteningly charming; Sid, lying pale and ashen on Chris’s lap, a dribble of blood leaking out of his visible ear, a trickle coming out of one nostril, a trickle that we hoped to God was from a punch to the nose and not the crack to his head, even though his face was unmarked except for that trickle of blood and his nose looked like it always had.
At some point, I figured that hoping to God might not be such a bad thing, I began reciting as many Hail Marys as I thought I could under my breath, except when it was so low-pitched my Marys began to sound like Martys, and after it had been going on for a few moments I decided that Marty was as good as Mary and ran with it, a thought that somehow filled me with adrenaline should Marty find out that Mary had been replaced, at least temporarily, by him. And apparently the adrenaline showed, because eventually I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder and jumped about an inch out of my seat and opened my eyes so wide it felt that they must refuse to yield any wider and would resort to popping out.
“What?” I asked, rather stupidly, and he smiled the sad smile that was the most any of us could muster.
“You’re shaking. And muttering something. I was going to ask if something was wrong.”
“Really?” My voice sounded empty and false to my own ears.
“Yeah. You have been since Sid played dead earlier.” At that statement a cold lump of ice settled somewhere in my stomach and transferred the contents of said stomach to my esophagus.
“Oh, God,” I said thickly, and got out of my seat as quickly as possible, racing off to the bathroom with Marty’s questioning eyes burning on my back.
In the bathroom, I didn’t even look for a stall that was clean. I just slid down on my knees in front of it and emptied my stomach on it, vomiting a substance that was, thankfully, nothing like the chowder Sid had projected earlier. I lowered the lid, grateful that the toilets here had any lid at all, and rested my head on it, cooling my face against the ceramic, allowing my heart to stop fluttering frantically like some bird that just discovered what it meant to be in a cage. As a sense of normalcy returned to my bodily functions, I begin to think clearly again, no more Mary/Marty mix ups, no more clam chowder nightmares. And, for once, there were no prayers or Semisonic lyrics. There was Slow Motion; Third Eye Blind. I couldn’t say exactly why it was that it was a Third Eye Blind song that came to my mind at that time, but the closest I could come is to say that I thought of Semisonic and prayers on days that were reserved for Marty. That day was Sid’s, so, Sid’s music would come to mind. And, if that wasn’t it, maybe it was that Semisonic music just isn’t fucked up enough to sum it all up. If anything was fucked up, it was that tauntingly slow, melodious song, Slow Motion. And so lyrics from Slow Motion came to my mind. See my neighbor’s beating his wife because he hates his life, there’s a knock to his fist as he swings; oh man what a beautiful thing. Hadn’t there been a sort of warped beauty to the fight? A blur, rose-tinted by the mind’s defense mechanisms; wasn’t that one of the most lovely things ever? At the time, it seemed so. And then, As death slides close to me, won’t grow old to be a junkie wino creep, wasn’t that Sid’s life in a nutshell? Marty’s mom would always say how Sid would grow up to be a heroin junkie. It always struck me as odd how she had said he would be a heroin junkie, seeing as we all smoked pot, but later, after reading and watching and learning the rhythms of life, I could see how it could happen. All it needed was the discovery that a new kind of drug provided a better high than either pot or the humor he clung so closely to, and he was done in. Eddie Dean of New York could have said as much, courtesy of Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
And eventually, the ceramic grew warm beneath my cheek and I stood up, stretching my legs, which had gone to sleep. I stumbled back into the waiting room, feeling washed-out and emptied-out and still terribly shitty about Sid, but overall, better. When I sat back down Marty leaned over to tell me in a low voice that the doctor said that Sid had had a brain hemorrhage, but it had been minor and he’d probably be fine; they were keeping him on drugs to prevent seizures until they were sure all the danger was past. And as I nodded, the trembling wavered in my limbs. It came back, of course, strong as ever, but it wavered.
By Sid, it wavered.