Chapter 10

It was less than a month until I set off for college. Between shifts at the restaurant I would go on shopping trips with my mom to buy the trappings of dorm life – extra long bedsheets, shower shoes and reusable, nonbreakable plastic cups and plates. Life felt exciting and full of possibilities. I continued seeing Graham as much as I could. For my 18th birthday, he took me to the movies to see Eyes Wide Shut. We went to the latest showing at 9:45pm. I promised my mother I’d be home as soon as the movie was over. What I failed to realize was that it was almost three hours long. By the time we drove back to Graham’s house to get my car, it was almost 1AM. I thought it was too late to call – better to just get home as fast as I could. By the time I got to my parent’s house it was past two. 

As I crept through the family room through to the kitchen, my mother popped out of the darkness. She’d been perched, staring out onto the driveway from the dining room window. “Sorry,” I sighed, “the movie went really long.” She looked me up and down then turned and walked away, letting out a huff. 

The next morning I awoke to being informed that – for the first time in my life – I was grounded. “But I’m eighteen! This is ridiculous!” I shouted at my mother, perhaps not showing the maturity I clearly felt I had. Her eyes bored right through me. “All I did was go to the movies,” I flipped my head back to the sky. I wasn’t allowed to see Graham for a week. 

All of this was new to my parents as well. I was their first and only daughter, one who never broke the rules and always did the right thing. Suddenly, I was making choices – bad ones in their eyes. Of course, keeping me from Graham was a terrible decision.  Stop the child from getting what they want and you only make them want it more. Perhaps they thought since I was off to college in a few weeks they could put an end to my silly romance with the weird, wet, boy. In effect, all it did was enhance my resolve that we were meant to be. I was the Courtney Love to his Kurt Cobain. I even tried to get him to run away with me. 

“We could run away and live in Providence!” I proclaimed one evening, propped next to him on his twin bed as he leaned out the window, pipe smoke wafting into the summer air. I’d thought about the places we could go. Boston was too close to home. New York was intimidating. Providence, in Rhode Island, with its prestigious design school and smaller stature seemed both far enough away and non-threatening. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he packed his pipe, “You need to go to school. You’ll love Philadelphia,” he said.

I sighed – not the answer I was looking for.

“Trust me, I’m not someone you wanna run away with. You deserve more.” He angled his lighter and lit the bowl. 

Graham was offering me a chance to get out of our relationship. A summer fling and nothing more. Yet when I looked at him, hunched over on the side of his bed, head down, fingers scratching his scalp – an itch that never went away – I saw someone who needed me. This was the first time I was shown a clear exit out of a bad relationship but was too blinded by a fierce belief in love that I shut it out. 

With me in Philly and Graham in Maine, our relationship sustained on hundreds of dollars in calling cards. Each week I would take the subway to The Gallery to buy another one. Connected through subway stops, The Gallery brought the suburban mall experience to Center City Philadelphia – a relic of years gone by. On the upper levels, department stores deteriorated under the pressure of the new world of online shopping. On the lower level – below ground – red-tiled floors played host to fast food chains and cheap impulse-item kiosks. 

Cell phones were expensive but for just a small connection fee of $1.29 I could speak with Graham for up to 300 minutes for just $20 on my landline. Still, I had to be careful. If I got the answering machine or his mom answered when he wasn’t home, my available minutes shrunk fast. When we had two minutes left an automated voice announced our impending disconnect, like saying goodbye on a prison call. As soon as I had the money, I’d buy another one.

Once, in my sophomore year, I missed him more than I could bear and secretly traveled to visit him via Greyhound bus. Normally, the nine hour trip from Philadelphia to Maine was reserved for Thanksgiving and Christmas and taken by train. As a broke student I rode the cheapest bus, which left me waiting at four o’clock in the morning on a Friday night at New York Port Authority. As I sat hunched against a wall with the other midnight travelers I watched as club kids adorned with glowing pink headbands danced past me – their tight middrifts exposed over baggy, parachute pants. In the corner stairwell a junkie leaned in for a quick hit off his crack pipe.

As all of my university friends bounced from relationship to relationship, exploring the new world that was laid out before us, I was spending endless nights dreaming of a future with Graham. Everyone knew about my boyfriend – as I referred to him – far, far away, but gave him very little thought. I was falling deeper and deeper, pretending this was love – blind to the fact that Graham was falling deeper and deeper into a hole of his own. 

The first time I told him I loved him I was sitting on the bathroom floor. That was where my cordless phone got the best reception. I sat cross-legged on the linoleum staring up at the small gray bathroom curtain, hanging precariously over the shower stall window. I’d thought a lot about how I would profess my love to Graham but I’d thought even more about what I would do if he didn’t say it back. I was desperate to tell him how I felt but I somehow already knew I wouldn’t get the reply I dreamt of. 

“I love you, Graham.” Silence only for the flick of his lighter. “And you know, I thought about it and,” I took a breath, a slight choke rising in my throat, “if you truly love someone, it doesn’t matter if they say it back.” 

“Ok,” he said. 

You have two minutes remaining on your AT&T PrePaid Phone Card. 

The bathroom curtain billowed in the breeze.

After speaking with my program director I received approval to spend part of my junior year summer internship at home. I was doing great academically but emotionally I struggled. I hadn’t formed as many concrete relationships as I thought I would, though my new friend Katy and I would get together on occasion. 

Graham was working as a line cook in a pizza shop run by a kind Lebanese family. The owner took a liking to Graham, with his dry sense of humor and helpfulness around the kitchen. By then, Graham had admitted to me that he struggled with depression. Though he’d tried a few different medications, nothing ever seemed to work. Around Christmas he found a new insurance provider that gave him access to a therapist and different prescription options. Things were looking up, but by summer everything seemed worse than it’d been before. He’d dropped the therapist and had quit taking the meds. He wouldn’t tell me why.

His drug use was changing too. Over the years, I would watch as he smoked weed out the window of his small, second story bedroom. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, he would sort and pick buds – a worn little wooden tray on the mattress in front of him. Now, he sat on the floor, the tray on his bedside table next to a pile of Arthur Schopenhauer books. The dim light of his swing arm lamp shone as he crushed pills with the back of a spoon, snorting them with a cut plastic straw.

I didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t acting differently. In fact, if I hadn’t seen it first-hand I wouldn’t have had a clue that it was happening at all. Maybe I was blowing things out of proportion. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal. But why couldn’t he stop? 

Graham took me with him to visit his dealer. Years of working in kitchens gave him a direct line to anyone who could supply anything. I never understood how he could be so transparent with me in some ways – openly sharing everything about his drug use – and hide others so vehemently like why he stopped taking antidepressants. 

We were driving around, enjoying summer as it breezed through the windows when Graham turned the truck towards a new direction. “Where are we going?” I asked as we exited the main road, a small neighborhood opening up before us. It was a heavily wooded area with small one-story homes. Many yards were overgrown, with weeping willows hanging over rusted cars left sinking in the grass. 

He kept his eyes on the road, “Don’t worry about it.” We pulled up to a ranch style house with peeling laminate siding. A faded green turtleshell sandbox laid against the wall by the front door. On the ground next to it a rusted girl's bike with a small lavender basket held two Barbie dolls, half naked, legs sticking up in the air. 

The inside of the house was cramped with dark, wood paneling lining the walls. The living room was anchored by a Lazy Boy covered in an aged Patriots blanket. Next to it, a dingy checkered sofa was pushed up against a large aquarium with a glowing neon heat lamp sunning the python within. We made our way to the kitchen, the walls and linoleum flooring yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. Around the table sat a large couple drinking instant coffee. The man’s t-shirt had the arms cut off, the woman in a moo-moo. Behind them, leaning against the sink was a tall, lanky man with a buzz cut. Sounds of cartoons emanated from the cheap particleboard door behind them. All eyes were all on me. Graham looked over, “Oh, she’s cool.”  

Graham made small talk with the woman – they’d briefly worked together at the pizza shop before she was fired for showing up late one too many times. The gangly man opened a cabinet next to the built-in microwave and pulled out a small plastic orange tackle box. From inside, he took out a little baggie. Graham had his cash ready – they made the exchange. I dipped my head slightly with an award smile and we left. 

“Those people were straight trash,” I said to Graham as we pulled back onto the main road. 

He lit a cigarette, sucking his cheeks in as he took a drag, “Don’t be so judgy.” He turned the music up.  

Over the course of the rest of the summer, more than once he would ask me to throw away his stash. “Just flush it down the toilet," he’d say, smoking in twilight on the front porch.  We’d argue fleetingly about what was happening but I wasn’t capable of truly understanding nor was he of sharing. He never took me to that house again. 

Towards the end of my senior year Graham planned his second trip to visit me in Philly. He came only once before, two years earlier in a snow storm. I drove carefully along the sharp curves of Lincoln Drive to pick him up at the train station. We spent a long weekend laying in bed, watching movies and listening to records. 

The pizza shop closed. Graham had no job and no plans. On a whim in April he said he’d arrive in a couple days. From the offset he was distant. I would find him leaning against my desk, smoking out the window, gazing off in the distance across the garden to the football field beyond. During the day when I was in class he sat around my apartment waiting for my return. He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to meet my friends. I had no idea what was going on with him or how I could help. But this time I was feeling a new emotion – frustration. Not because I couldn’t figure out how to help him, but because it was dawning on me that he had always been like this. I’d just been too blinded by love to see it. 

On the third night, I managed to talk him into going to a show in Center City. Doc Watson’s was a small club in Philly’s Midtown with a dingy club space upstairs where local bands played. A couple years later it would close down after over a hundred minors were found drinking there. That night, Ryan had a show and I wanted Graham to come along to experience first-hand the life I was building for myself. If only I had realized how stifled it was by the very man I wanted to share it with. 

A small crowd of friends was forming, I looked to Graham. “Let’s go talk with them, I have some people I want you to meet!” I beamed. 

“I think I’m gonna sit here and have a beer,” he pulled up a bar stool. “Have fun,” he sat and turned to face the small, rickety bar, hidden in the back corner by the stairwell. I shook my head and made my way to the makeshift stage area – a back wall flanked by speakers and cords.

I watched as Ryan’s band prepped for their set. A guy in a gray suit with a crooked striped tie sidled up next to me. He had a boyish face with gauges in his ears. I’d never seen him before, but a friend told me he was a graphic design major named Jon. I eyed him up and down, “So, what’s with the suit?” I asked furtively. 

“The suit makes the man,” he straightened his tie. “When I turned eighteen I decided from then on, I would always wear a suit.” I nodded, taking a swig of my beer. 

The band started their sound check. Test. Test. Jon leaned over, “Hey, you wanna go out sometime?” 

I looked back at Graham, head down staring at his beer. “Um, maybe? I’m kind of here with someone,” I said, motioning back to the bar. “Well, where is he now? I don’t see him,” he shrugged. “Here, take my card.” He handed me a white business card – clean in a sans serif font with his name, phone number and school email. 

“What’s this? Your business card?” I laughed incredulously, showing it to some girls standing nearby.

“I don’t care! I’ll give one to everyone!” he raised his hand with a flourish. “Here!” Jon started tossing cards around the room. “Here!” They flew through the air like confetti. I made eye contact with Ryan – guitar poised to play the opening notes. He smirked and looked down, smashing the pedal at his feet. Jon chuckled, shoving me with his shoulder. The music picked up and we all started to sway.

Graham never turned around.