Maybe he was broken. But what they failed to understand was that Sherm didn’t want to be fixed. He liked the way he was.
I watched him squirm in his seat. He was always twitching, and talking a little too loudly, like he was trying extra hard to have a good time. I always had the impression that just underneath that party hard exterior, there was a guy waiting to snap and go postal. But he made me laugh. I think that’s why we loved him so much. Sherm could make you laugh like nobody else. That was how John and I first met him. He moved here four years ago, all the way from Portland. He never told us the whole story, but I got the impression that he’d been in some trouble out there; he knew a lot about guns and shit. Maybe he came east looking to get away from whatever it was. He got a job at the foundry, and the first time we saw him, he was standing behind us at the time clock, making sarcastic comments under his breath about everybody who walked by. He had us laughing so hard that tears literally ran down our faces. We introduced ourselves, invited him out for a beer, and that was all it took.
Sherm could make you laugh— but he could piss you off just as quickly. He could cut you with his words; his tongue was like a razor, and he knew how to use it. One comment from Sherm could slice your jugular. He was good at tearing things down— things you cared about. He’d borrow money and not pay you back. He liked to pick fights when he was really drunk. He was always right about everything, even when he was clearly wrong. And sometimes, just sometimes, you got the impression that he’d sleep with your wife if he knew that he could get away with it. Half the town wanted to hug him, and the other half wanted to strangle the living shit out of him. With the exception of John and my family, I’m closer to Sherm than I am with just about anyone else in the world, and I’ve wanted to do both. But the bottom line is this. He may have been crazy, he may have been completely fucking mental and immature and cocky, and sometimes he may have pissed me off so bad that I wanted to shoot him, but at the end of the day, he was my friend, and that’s all that mattered to me. Him and John. My best friends, guys I’d take a bullet for.
I had to tell them.
Angie showed up with another round, and set the beers and shots down in front of us. She started to speak but then flinched, as if she’d been goosed. Still holding the serving tray, she reached behind her back and grabbed Sherm by the wrist.
“Hey,” she called out to the bar, “did anybody lose a hand? Because I found this one halfway up my crotch!”
She held his arm up for all to see. The room erupted with laughter, and Sherm grumbled something under his breath. Then everyone returned to their conversations, their dart games, the pool table, and who was going home with whom later on that night. I asked Angie to take a round over to Juan and his crew to make up for our fight earlier in the day. Somebody fed another dollar into the jukebox and now it segued from Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” to something new by Method Man. Like I said before, it was that kind of town and that kind of bar. John chuckled into his beer. “She busted you, Sherm! Angie got you good!”
“Shut up, Carpet Dick . . .”
John. Good old John. Nobody, other than me, had ever treated him with any respect. Not his family. Not his teachers. Not the other kids. How many times had he been called stupid in his life? Way too many to count. But that’s because he really was stupid. I’ve known John most of my life, and I’ve never known him to be clever. When we were kids, I was always bailing him out of trouble. Like the time he threw rocks at Mr. Nelson’s trailer, breaking all of the windows in the front. I confessed to it and took the rap just to keep him out of trouble, and Old Man Nelson marched over to my house, foaming at the mouth, and demanded that my mother pay for the damage. She just laughed and, after he stormed away, she beat the shit out of me. Later, when I could sit down again without wincing, I asked John why he did it. I don’t know, Tommy. I guess I just like the sound of breaking glass . . . That was John in a nutshell. Old Man Nelson hadn’t done anything to him. He hadn’t done it to be malicious. He just liked the sound of breaking glass. He didn’t know why he did things— he just did them. But I loved him anyway. Sherm, crazy enough to drink gasoline and piss on a fire; and John, dumb as a fucking fencepost. I loved them both, though I would have never told them that.
But I would have to tell them about the cancer. I had to tell somebody. Both the secret and the disease were eating me up inside.
I took a sip of beer and my nose started running. I wiped at it and my index finger came away glistening and red. John and Sherm both got quiet and I looked up to find them staring at me.
“Yo man,” Sherm pointed, “your nose is bleeding and shit.”
“Fuck! Okay, I’ll be right back. Don’t either of you drink my beer.”
I shoved a soggy napkin up my nostrils to stop the flow, got up from the table, and weaved toward the bathroom. Juan caught me, wrapped an arm around my shoulder and slurred out a drunken half-English, half- Spanish apology. I told him that it was okay, peeled him off of me, and waited in line for the bathroom. Eventually, the door banged open and a fat, drunken redneck in a beer-stained flannel shirt stumbled out. I slipped inside, carefully avoiding stepping in the puddle of piss on the floor.
I stared into the mirror and what I saw didn’t look good.
“Son of a bitch . . .”
I ran some paper towels under the cold water, then wadded them up and held them to my nose. I leaned my head backward, giving me an unobstructed view of the dingy bathroom ceiling. Somebody had managed to scrawl graffiti up there, between the dim lightbulb and the spiderwebs; SUICIDE RUN KICKS ASS and NUKE GUMBY and that popular old standby EVELYN IS A HO, along with the phone number where you could supposedly reach her for a good time.
After a few minutes, the bleeding slowed to a trickle and stopped completely. I cleaned my face and washed my hands, then wiped the droplets of blood from the sink and garbage can. Considering the bathroom’s filthy condition, it was useless, but I did it anyway. The nausea hit me with no warning just as I was finishing. I bolted for the stall and the hot bile erupted, spraying through my fingers, spattering the walls and running down my forearms. Something hard pushed itself up through my throat. I fell to my knees, and the stench from the toilet made me puke more. The bowl was caked with brown and yellow stains and I noticed that I was kneeling in something wet. But what I threw up was even grosser. Unless I was mistaken, I’d just thrown up my own feces. It seemed impossible, but that’s what it looked and smelled like.
Just the sight of it— the very thought— made me puke a third time. There was enough force this time to cause a splash-back effect, and brackish toilet water hit my face, dripping from my nose and eyes and cheeks. I stayed there, heaving and crying and gagging, until there was absolutely nothing left to come up. My stomach cramped and my throat burned, like I’d drunk battery acid. I knew it would only get worse in the days to come. This was only a taste of what the cancer had in store for me.
For the second time since entering the bathroom, I cleaned myself up as best I could. My mouth tasted like shit (literally) and I lit up a smoke to correct the problem. Then I returned to the table. John and Sherm had ordered another round while I was gone, and now I had two beers in front of me. The cold soothed my throat. I made quick work of them both, and signaled Angie for another. She arched her eyebrow in concern, but took the order.
“Coke?” Sherm asked.
“No, another beer.”
“No man, I mean your nose. You been doing coke?”
“I don’t fuck with that shit. You know that. All I do is weed.”
“You sick then?”
“Yeah. I’ve been a little under the weather. Look, it was just a nosebleed, Sherm. It’s no big deal.”
“You should get that shit checked out, dog,” John mused. “I once heard about a guy that bled to death from a nosebleed.”
“That’s just an urban legend.”
“What does that mean?”
“An urban legend? You know, like alligators in the sewer and the hook-handed killer at lover’s lane. Shit like that.”
John looked surprised.
“You mean they made that guy with the hook up?”
I sighed and took a sip of his beer.
“Hey, that one’s mine!”
“Thanks.”
