The Cake is a Lie (27 page)

“
They transferred over my
credits wrong, can you believe that? They’re trying to say I can’t
graduate.” She paused, but none of us jumped in fast enough, “Sure
I’m not an A student, but I get B’s and C’s. I handle my shit, I’ve
never failed a class.”

“
That’s bunk,” Ross replied
characteristically.

“
Ok I’ve failed one class.”
She blurted out. This got a big laugh from everyone. “Physics, but
that doesn’t count, that teacher was a creep. He hit on me, I
swear. I even got it taken off my record.”

Right as my fantasies really got going
Casey pulled her unreciprocated arm away from my body and jumped
over to hold Ross. In-between she suspiciously stumbled for a
second before grabbing onto him. She reached behind his neck and
pulled out the tag of his shirt, “Where was your shirt made?
Heaven?”

“
What are you on?” I
interjected laughing.

“
I’m not on anything.” She
answered annoyed. “Well… I was feeling under the weather so I took
this flu medicine.”

“
Oh ya, ‘flu medicine,’” I
kid. The bell rang and everyone walked off except Casey and the two
of us she’d grabbed.

“
I swear, I’m not on
anything.” She declared again once the hallway died down, this time
suspiciously unprompted.

“
How much flu medicine did
you take?” I asked. Maybe she is robotripping? Robotripping was a
fad of drinking robotussin that had hit a few months ago. Eric,
Jay, Jon, Jeff and, Nate had all done it.

“
I don’t know…” She
said.

Ross and I both looked at each other
seriously. “Do you need help?”

“
I need to go to the
academic advisor.”

“
I don’t think you should go
to the academic advisor right now.”

“
Well, then I want to go
home. Will one of you take me home?”

“
I’ll take her,” I
volunteered faster than a saint.

“
I better help,” Ross added.
As we headed for my car Casey started walking off kilter, laughing
as she ran into garbage cans. Ross and I worked together to hold
her between us and keep her on track.

Casey lived in a nice area, in a
rambler amongst three story houses. After she opened her door she
ran inside, leaving Ross and I standing hesitantly outside. By the
time we decided we to step in and follow her she’d returned holding
a big framed picture. The picture was of an older man in a pilot’s
uniform kissing another man on the cheek.

“
Before you even ask, or get
to looking at this picture and start wondering, this is my dad.”
She pointed to the pilot. “He’s gay. If you got anything to say
about it you can get the fuck out. I love my dad more than
anything. Seriously, if that’s a problem, let’s do this right now.”
She put a fist in the air and gave us a dirty look as we laughed at
her. It was impossible to tell if she was being serious or making
jokes.

“
As you can see, he’s also a
pilot. He’s gone for weeks at a time, right now he’s in the
Philippines.” She ran off back into the house.

Cautiously, I walked in and took a seat
on the edge of a leather couch. The clothes laying all over the
very well-kept house suggested she’d had the place to herself for a
bit. Ross threw himself on a loveseat with a pile clothes on
it.

“
Have you guys ever seen a
fake ID before?” She yelled from a room down the
hallway.

“
You have a fake
ID?”

Footsteps scurried down the wood floor
hallway until Casey appeared barefoot and shirtless. She was
halfway through changing, in only a black bra and jeans, holding a
wallet that she tossed at me. Tingles ran down my back like a hot
liquid.

“
Okay you guys have to be
honest, do you like this bra? I got it in New York. Is the bow
stupid?” She pointed at the puffy dangling bow in the middle. I
raised my palm up as a blinder to politely half block her from my
vision.

“
You already know its bomb,”
Ross complimented.

“
It’s the nicest bra I’ve
seen,” I said. The big bow was definitely stupid.

She didn’t seem satisfied and started
modeling herself in front of a mirror on the wall. I pretend to be
interested in the fake ID for a second before tossing it over to
Ross.

“
You go out to
clubs?”

“
All the time,” she answered
as she headed back down the hallway. “I meet all kinds of guys out,
doctors and lawyers, they buy me stuff. I met a surgeon last week.”
The hope I’d been holding onto of seducing her was thrown away with
the comment. Ross and I made funny faces at each other until she
reappeared again in pajamas.

“
I was feeling really sick
so I bought these this morning.” She threw a bottle of flu
medication over to Ross as she walked past us into the kitchen.
“You guys want some cookies?”

He unscrewed the top and turned over
the bottle to show me it was empty.

“
You ate the whole bottle?”
I asked alarmingly. She came back and settled on a sofa with an
unopened cookie box.

“
I guess”

“
Why?”

“
I felt sick, I feel better
now.”

“
You tried to kill
yourself?” She was silent.

“
Do you know how good your
life is?” This was the opening to one of my favorite
spiels.

No response.

“
Twenty thousand children
die a day from poverty. Even more have their growth stunted from
malnutrition. A 1.5 billion people can’t read or write. Billions
without sanitation, clean water. You can shower, go to the
bathroom, you sleep on pillows, and you’ve never known hunger or
the cold.” I recalled the last time I gave this speech, in social
psych, right before volunteering to eat some dog food for a class
experiment.

Casey had her gaze buried in the cookie
box nutritional information.

“
And you’re
beautiful.”

This got a reaction from her. “Oh
really? How beautiful?”

“
More beautiful than you’ll
never know.” She smiled faintly but still looked unsatisfied, as if
what she really wanted me to tell her was that she was short and
her jaw was kind of boney. “You could be blind,” I continued, “You
can see, what a gift is it to see, to hear, to touch.” I ran my
fingers along the clingy leather texture of the couch.

The smile turned back into a frown.
“Are you happy?” She asked. “You look happy.”

“
I am happy. And you should
be to. Billions of people can’t even imagine how good it is to be
you.”

We sat with her as she fell asleep,
curled up with her unopened cookie box.

On the way home I ruminated deeply,
unable to imagine Casey’s unhappiness. To be living in paradise and
not be able to enjoy it. Why couldn’t she see how lucky she was? We
all had problems.

From my car console I pulled out my
cigarette case. Throughout the day I looked inside it. Half the
case was lined with 10 soft, immaculately rolled cigarettes
squeezed together by a lighter. A perfectly rolled up bag of
chronic was fit neatly into the other half of the box. Everything I
need was there, organized perfectly inside the little
case.

I’d quit e and coke forever. I’d quit
hallucinogens forever after being chased by dagger wielding snake
men and dragons. I’d quit painkillers and morphine after getting
dope sick. But, overall, the last four years had been pure
happiness, I was truly happy, and weed had been with me the whole
way. Instant and fool proof gratification.

Running my finger along the evenness of
the packed cigarettes butts I looked up to the sky and proudly
begrudged god. Is that all you got? It doesn’t matter what else
happens to me, do your worst. I’ll be fine as long as I have my
weed and cigarettes.

I saw Casey in passing at a graduation
event a week later. She smiled but we were never seen talking
again.

I woke up on a sunny morning at summer
camp. I was extra groggy and gross as usual, but one of my first
thoughts happily popped me out of bed and led me into the woods,
giddy with anticipation. The first bowl of the day was always the
best. Every hit after that only made you more tired. I’d be
sleepwalking by 3, asleep by 7.

The first tickle of smoke trickling
into my lungs caused me to vomit a waterfall of cheese blintzes and
tacos. Leaving me stunned, burping up puffs of smoke and chunks of
food. I didn’t feel like I had a flu, my stomach just hurt like
crazy. I went to lay down in the nurse’s office. Bedridden with
stabbing bloatedness, I didn’t smoke the rest of the day. Or the
next.

On the third day, back at home and
feeling a little better, I decided to ease back into it and invited
a few friends over to watch a movie and get high. After two puffs I
threw up three times all over the floor and became positive that
the weed was laced with chemicals and was a bad mix.

I quickly rushed my friends
out of the house, “Sorry guys I have the flu, plus I got rush to go
visit my mom in the hospital, her condition’s getting worst.” I
only felt some relief after the ambulance paramedics checked me out
and assured me I was fine. The next day I bought a bag of weed from
my most trusted source. After all that I just
had
to get high and relax. I told him
that there was some laced weed going around and he promised me his
stuff was all natural.

After a puff I ended up forcing my
friend to take me to the emergency room.

It was something with my stomach I told
the doctor. Cancer, or a parasite from my trip to Mexico, from that
feces infested river water. I envisioned a five feet long worm
that’d been growing inside me for over a year, eating my organs.
They checked me out and said I was fine, to come back if something
new came up. Two days later I threw up three glasses of champagne
at my dad’s wedding. I forced my brother to take me to the
ER.

This time I said something right
because they scheduled me for an endoscopy the next day. I was
thrilled the doctors were finally going to do something. I knew my
body, I knew when something was wrong. My mom’s tumor grew in her
stomach for over a year, by the time it was discovered it was the
size of loaf of bread. That wasn’t going to happen to
me.

When my dad and I met with the doctor
after the operation he delivered me the awful news, they didn’t
find anything.

He looked me in the eye and said,
“Marco, I think you’ve been having panic attacks, that’s what’s
making you throw up.” He recommended I see a psychiatrist and a
therapist.

On the way home my dad told me about
how anxiety and panic runs in my family. How my mom had
debilitating panic attacks during law school. How my uncle lost his
big modeling career because of panic. How my aunt was too afraid to
drive. I half listened, mainly thinking about how I couldn’t smoke
pot or drink anymore. That was what kept making me throw up. Up
until that point it had never crossed my mind that I might not soon
be back my no-stress buddha blowing lifestyle.

When we got to my dad’s house he put on
my favorite T.V. show to cheer me up. It might as well have been in
another language. Anxiety is all the discomfort of suffocation, my
brain had just refused to stop working correctly. An infinite
future of this loomed over me. I began to cry uncontrollably. My
step mom exited the room to give my dad and me some privacy as he
held me.

I decided to hide away at my dad’s for
the rest of the summer and stop returning calls. The transition to
sober life wasn’t smooth. Smoking weed was my whole identity, no
worries. I was still convinced I had some unknown illness. Certain
I was going to die in my sleep I’d fight to keep my eyes open every
night. But words like “cancer,” “insanity” and “death” cannot
express the totality of fear you feel when the wholeness of your
existence is in danger.

I experienced all kinds of new agonies
for the first time. I lost my appetite and stopped
eating.

I wasn’t stupid, I immediately ran with
the theory that my drug use caused this. Faced with a mood
catastrophe, the resemblances of memories from frying balls on a
bunch of drugs at 15 aren’t hard to find. I could feel the brain
damage just thinking about it. My developing brain had just taken
one too many punches to the head. I completely turned on my old
self, all drugs, and built a fortress of regret to rule
from.

That was when some really weird things
started happening. I became afraid of touching public places, to
avoid the one in fifty million chance that I might get a contact
high from someone on drugs who touched the same place. I started
only drinking bottled water, afraid that there was a one in three
hundred million chance someone put LSD in my drink. It was safer to
not take the risk. I devoted most of my thoughts to thinking of any
possible way I might get drugged and did everything in my power to
avoid those situations. I stopped shaking hands and held my breathe
when I passed by homeless people.

The therapist taught me breathing
exercises. “In 1, 2, 3. Out 1, 2, 3.” She also kept recommending I
see a psychiatrist and start a medication but I adamantly resist.
Drugs had caused all this and the last thing I was going to do was
take more drugs, especially from the big pharmaceutical
corporations. But as the start of senior year, and the thought of
facing people, drew closer, I waivered.