The Drive Home

By Ben Leib

I believed in God, so it was in earnest when I prayed for my life to end.  I knelt at the foot of my bed and went through my nightly routine.  I offered myself to my Maker.  I prayed for guidance and the wisdom to recognize and to act upon what was right.  I wanted to be a good man. 

I prayed not to be angry but upon a review of my day I found myself furiously unhappy.

“God,” I said, “please kill me.  Please take my life, Lord, for I find this existence unbearable.  It’s too hard, God, and I can’t take my own life.  I’m too afraid.  So please, Lord, please kill me.”

“God,” I went on, “I’ve been laid once in the past two years.  I have so many dreams, God, so many ambitions, and I work hard to bring them to fruition but I always fall short.  Is that why I’m here, Lord?  To fall short?  I understand that nobody is happy all the time, but I just wish that I could be content.  And I feel helpless because this life, the one that I’ve led all along, it hasn’t been so hard.  I could have faced much worse tribulations, God, and I thank you for the grace I’ve been given.  But it’s too hard for me.  Each day, a trial of its own.  I don’t want to do it anymore, Lord, so I pray that you end my life.”

And as I finished the prayer, my phone rang.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Hey, it’s Charlene.”

This was unexpected.

“Hey, how are you doing?”

“Look, I’m sorry to call,” she dove right in.  “I wouldn’t if I wasn’t totally stranded.  All my besties have kids and my family’s busy looking after my nephew.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I need a ride home from SFO tomorrow night.  My flight gets in at eleven, and I’m totally stranded…”

—

Our meeting in a smoky barroom had not ignited fires, nor was it the stuff of nostalgic reverie.  We were both drunk, it was late at night, and mutual friends were egging us on.  We were both lonely and both het up by drink and by sustained abstinence, and so it was unsurprising when Charlene took me home after last call.

We giggled as we ascended the staircase into Charlene’s apartment. 

I nearly passed out on the living room couch before she could get me into the bedroom.

When Jeanne, Charlene’s roommate, appeared, I told her to shut up and leave me alone.

“You don’t get to tell me to shut up in my own home,” Jeanne said.

“Jesus Jeanne,” I said, “you never told me you had such a beautiful roommate.”

Jeanne looked at Charlene, “How’d you even get him up the stairs?”

Charlene smiled and swayed.  With a forefinger and a devilish smirk she beckoned me into her bedroom.  We kissed standing, pawing at each other, not patient enough to dwell upon the newness of each others’ bodies, as if in that drunken and lonely state only an act of penetration, only an exchange of fluids would have the alchemical potency to fundamentally alter our desperation.  I pressed my face into Charlene’s, tasting the smoke and the booze.  My fingers worked their way over the buttons of her shirt, eager to explore the flesh within but not animal enough, even in my stupor, to actually tear the cloth from her body.

“You’ve got amazing tits,” I muttered.

“Thank you.”

I took a breast into both hands, feeling its heaviness, and I buried my face against Charlene’s chest, mouth open, kissing as much of her bare body as I could.  I kissed down her abdomen, and fumbled at the waist line of Charlene’s jeans until she reached down to help me.

Once Charlene’s jeans and underwear were lying on the floor of her room, I didn’t take the time to appreciate the miracle that was Charlene’s ass, the perfect hugeness and roundness of it.  I didn’t take my time to work her up, teasing her.  I stood, threw my own pants from my body, and crawled on top of her.

We both received the minimum of what we sought.  Once we were naked and intertwined, I used Charlene’s body to sate my need.  The booze didn’t help.  What the booze did do was decrease sensitivity, and I became frustrated, turning Charlene over for better access and less obstructed motion.  I thrust into her from behind, shoving her face into the pillow as she groaned, and I hammered away until I came into her, by which time Charlene’s body had already collapsed, and she lay on her belly, panting, still groaning a bit.  I lay on my back beside her, sweating.

“Thank you,” I said, and then, “You have an amazing ass.”

Charlene groaned.

—

That night I forgot Charlene’s name.  I snuck out of bed, unable to sleep until I found out.  I tiptoed into the kitchen and sifted through a pile of mail that sat on the counter until I came across a small cardstock advertisement with Charlene’s name printed on it.  I folded it into a square and snuck back into the bedroom, where I slipped the junk mail into the pocket of my pants.

We exchanged numbers before I departed the next morning, but I never tried to woo Charlene again.  We weren’t exactly uncomfortable around each other, and happily participated in hello, how are ya’s, and awkward hugs, but for the next ten years I devoted the little time I spent thinking of Charlene to a contemplation of my own insensitivity.  From that night on I was embarrassed in her presence, and I secretly believed that she had dirt on me, that she could gossip about my over-eager fumbling – a prospect that I found terrifying.

—

 “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t have anything going on.  I can pick you up.”

“Are you serious?” Charlene asked.

“Sure, I think it’d be good for me to do something nice for somebody.  Maybe I’ll stop thinking about myself for five minutes.  Just text me the flight info.”

Moments later, Charlene sent the airline, flight number, and arrival time.  She included a message that read, “Here’s my algorithm: Who’s local?  No kids?  Who do you want to be friends with?  Ask for a random needed favor: cement for friendship.  And I didn’t even have to offer sexual favors, though they’re still on the table.”  A winking emoticon acted as the period to the final sentence.

The message made me take pause.  Charlene had gotten married and given birth to two children, and, as far as I knew, she was still married, so that last little comment could only have been meant as a joke, right?

Whatever the case, I was forced to reconsider the faith I’d placed in memory.

—

I’d been kneeling at my bed, saying over and over again, “God, please kill me,” as if a perverse will could be manifested through incantation.

And my Creator had established a scenario in which death was plausible.  First off, the trip to San Francisco Airport took me through the twisting back roads of Highway 17, on which accidents were a regular occurrence.  Furthermore, though the weather report had not predicted it ahead of time, the first autumn rain came pouring in that afternoon and had not let up by the time I departed.  The skies simply opened up, and all I could read in that storm was unsafe driving conditions.  There was roadwork taking place on the 17.  Each night, county workers shut down one lane travelling in either direction.  Fast moving traffic was forced to merge abruptly, and the narrow lanes were confined by too-close concrete slabs.

—

I had always believed in a God, some Creative Intelligence or Spirit of the Universe type of thing, that was responsible for the mysterious harmonies of existence.  But my God operated mechanistically, without concern for pleasure or pain.  There were times even, not so many years before, that I convinced myself that I’d been cursed.  My suffering seemed divinely determined, and I’d chosen to medicate my pain.

One particular night I’d gotten started early and by nine in the evening I realized that I’d consumed the better part of a half gallon of bourbon.  Walking over to Dallas’s house, it dawned on me that I’d be better off in bed, or, possibly, in the hospital.  It was raining that night, and I walked passed the government building, through the park and then the drug store parking lot, up Walnut Avenue, so that by the time I reached my friend’s house I was soaked through, feeling I must look the wreck of a human being I knew myself to be.

I bought an eight ball from Dallas and we worked on that before heading to the bar, where I continued to power through bourbon and took regular trips to the bathroom stalls.

On my way home, I thought to myself, My heart is racing.  This may be it for me, I thought.  These may be my final moments.  Though the thought frightened me it did not deter me, and when I arrived back at my apartment complex to find my neighbors smoking crystal in the driveway I joined them, almost daring death, driving myself through dark places in search of a threshold from which I could not return.

I entered my apartment, uncapped the bottle of whiskey that I had waiting there for me, and upended it.  I twisted apart opioid gel caps and snorted their contents to take the edge off. 

All else was lost to the delirium.  The clothes crumpled in the corner, the accumulation of scrapes and bruises, the mud that I tracked into the house – these were the material evidence that I survived despite forgetting.  And when I awoke the next morning I thought to myself, It’s a fucking miracle.

—

At ten PM, as I set off from Santa Cruz, I contemplated the darkness that had driven me for so many years.  The rain pounded the windshield of my little Kia Rio as I hit the base of the mountains, through which I had to pass on my way to SFO.  The little dips in the highway had already become troughs, siphoning standing water off of the pavement, and I hydroplaned through these troughs, feeling the steering wheel take its own control for brief but terrifying instants.  I saw the traffic around me, and imagined how easily any one of these cars could veer off course, sideswiping me into the retaining wall.  Though I was scared of death, I did not shy from it.  If anything, I drove more aggressively through the storm.  C’mon God, I faced my Maker, you put me here, in fitting conditions for an accidental death, I’m giving you the means, the recklessness, just twist the wheel, God, blow my tire.

What form would that reckoning would look like?  How would I make peace?  How would I come to my own terms, and how would I come to terms with my Creator? 

I was lonely, and I was as lost as I’d ever been.

I made my way through that night, and I made my way to San Francisco Airport, where Charlene stood by the arrivals gate, looking scattered and slightly nervous that maybe I wouldn’t show up.  But I did show up.

—

I parked at the sidewalk, climbed out of the car, and called Charlene’s name.  She smiled, dragging her luggage over to the curb.  I could smell her when we hugged.  She had a sour odor of the un-bathed after a day of travel.  We loaded her things and set off.

And I found that I had new things on my mind, but I chose to keep them to myself. 

Instead I listened while Charlene talked. 

She was still adapting to motherhood and to the confines of marriage. 

“I’ve always been depressive,” she revealed, “and I’ve never quite been able to figure out what to do about it.  I always liked to drink, but it seems like lately I’ve taken it to a new level.  The drugs that the psychiatrist prescribed me make it so that I can drink tons without ever getting too drunk, so I’ve found that I’m just running through the bottles of wine.  You know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“So then I break out the gin, start mixing myself up martinis, that type of thing.  And it just gets bad.  I don’t want to be doing this around my babies.  You know, it’s not really right.  But I also can’t figure out how to feel good about being a mother.  It isn’t something that I can be flighty about.”

“I can relate to that,” I said.  “Not to being a dad, but just the weight that life puts on you sometimes…”

“How did you do it?”

“What?”

“How’d you stop?”

Because I turned to Charlene, examined her for a moment, recognizing the youthful beauty that had been there all along, that had been present for the past ten years, because I needed, at that moment, to make eye contact and let her know that she was not alone in these struggles, that I understood better than I would be able to explain, I wouldn’t have seen the misplaced headlights, pointed tree-ward, appear from the darkness of a blind turn, nor would I have needed the opportunity for a reckoning with my Maker.