I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page B

he had been too easy to get rid of. I recalled a line from Circus Lupus’s “I Always Thought You Were an Asshole”: “Florida is not so far away / In fact, it’s just another grave.” That story Ben always told about his friend who had set a girl on fire and buried her in a swamp . . . could he have been the one who did it? I wouldn’t feel safe till he was in jail or a mental institution, and I worried that I hadn’t seen the last of him.

    One day that summer, my boss called me into his office.
    â€œSit down, Mishka,” he said.
    That was a bad sign. I sat down. He closed the office door behind me. That was another bad sign.
    â€œListen, Mishka, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life but . . . it’s impossible to work with you and not notice a few things.”
    Thank God. Dave was just going to ride me about drinking.
    â€œYou are speaking of my good looks? Or is it my joie de vivre?”
    â€œThe drinking, Mishka. How much do you drink?”
    â€œJesus, Dave, you scared me. I thought you were going to fire me.”
    â€œNo, no, you’re doing great, my number one guy, I just—”
    â€œI know, Dave, I know, I’m going to kill myself, and I have soooo much to offer and so much potential and blah blah blah, right?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “I’m not worried that you’re going to die. You can drink hard for a long time without dying. But there are things worse than death. I’m more worried that you’ll end up behind a desk, like me. Mishka, if I could turn my desk over and fuck it—just for spite—I would.”
    I laughed it off in the moment, but slowly Dave’s dread wormed its way into me. My two-bedroom apartment had become a flop for ex–Simon’s Rockers, sleeping seven or eight people at a time, with one in the kitchen and two in the closet. The charm of working to drink/drinking to sleep/sleeping to work had worn off. I could labor eighty hours a week in a hot, wet, filthy kitchen for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for it but varicose veins and fallen arches. How was this lonely drudgery revenge? What would it say on my tombstone, “He Made Great Potato Salad”?
    I called my mother, and she helped me reenroll at the University of Colorado. School was the only thing I did well, and I knew college was essential if I hoped to rescue my mother from working poverty. A degree would get me a job, a job would get me money, money would get me revenge. I would slave through the spring and summer, then cross the country once more not to take a stab at college but to annihilate it.
    My mom found a house in Boulder, closer to CU, with a finished basement I could live in. The catch was that I had to find aroommate. Fuck, Mom, how would I find a Colorado roommate in Massachusetts?
    I asked James, I asked Bertocci, I asked all my buddies. No takers. It came to me at work one day: Scott, a cook in his forties I worked with. He loved Ray Charles, as I did; he had played drums for Lou Reed, and he liked to drink. He would be the perfect roommate.
    â€œMan, I would love to. But I got my kid here. And, you know, this job that I love so much.”
    â€œHey man, no problem,” I said, feigning hurt. “It’s cool. I didn’t even really want you to live with me, anyway. I’m just asking every person I bump into. Hey, Speck, you want to move to Colorado with me to be my roommate?”
    Speck was a dishwasher a couple of years older than me, cute with a black bob and penetrating blue eyes. She had been head of the Judicial Committee at Simon’s Rock. She had compelled me to write a letter to Pay-Rite apologizing for the shoplifting thing, and she had presided over the session in which I’d had to grovel to graduate. She went by Speck instead of her real name, which struck me as self-indulgent. Why she was working as a dishwasher now, I couldn’t figure out,