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Matthew Roberts
82362 Five Lakes Rd.Bush, LA 70431
985.373.0414
Donny Isnt There When Tom Calls Me for a Ride
1.
Donny is there. Donnys there on the stage in the cafeteria at James Madison
Elementary School for the talent show. He wears a white jumpsuit, thick framed
sunglasses, and a cape. He lipsynchs to Elvis, mimics the Kings patented moves for the
PTA. Taking a knee. Spinning the arm. Being all shook up. Donnys there. Donnys
there in the front room of that low white house on Chastant with the fake suits of armor
flanking the china cabinet. Those fake wood handled swords and maces mounted on
velvet above the lamps behind the couch. A large crucifix on the wall. The heavily
lacquered wood plaque with theFootprints poem found in the home of so many Catholic
households in suburban New Orleans. Donnys there in that front room wearing a navy
blue Cub Scout uniform, his thick black hair no longer greased back, but still plastered
down, over a slim face of freckles with almond eyes. Others are there, wearing bright
yellow bandanas and brass Fox badges. Trey Higgins. Glenn Olivier. My brother, Tom.
The boys make their costumes for the annual Cub Scout parade, paw through bags of old
beads and doubloons from last years Mardi Gras. Endymion. Argus. Rex. Deciding
what to keep and what to throw to the families lined up along Kawanee. Donnys there in
the backyard of that house with Tom, horsing around the in-ground pool. Splashing.
Running. Skinning a knee or elbow on the concrete bottom. Donnys there with Tom at
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]8/9/2019 Donny Isn't There When Tom Calls Me for a Ride
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the tiki bar at the back of the cabana. The boys sneak slugs of Ten High, fill their pull-
tab Coke cans with rum. Donnys there. Donnys there when Mr. Don comes home late
from the car dealership on Causeway Boulevard, stopping first at Sweet Williams
Tavern and then someplace with the word Lounge in the name. Again. And again.
Donny is there. Donnys in the driveway, washing the Chevy SuperSport his dad
gave him for his birthday the year he gets his drivers license. That black hair standing
out against the red screen that means Under 18. That doesnt matter. Donny stands with
Tom under the fluorescent lights of the convenience store sign waiting for David Seoul,
Chris Wertz, or one of the other older boys to reappear from inside with a six pack of
Miller ponies. Donnys there in the back room of our house playing Intellivision with
Tom, in the garage converted into a game room after the fire, when a knock comes at the
double doors. Ill be right back, Tom says. Donny stays behind, the controller in his
hand, while Tom sneaks off to sit beside The Green Thing on the corner to get high.
Donnys with Tom in the courtyard at Archbishop Rummel, wearing the powder blue
collared shirt and navy pants, each daring the other to ditch Religion to smoke cigarettes
behind the modular buildings, keeping an eye out for Brother ______. Donny has
trouble with math, Tom has trouble at the bus stop with older boys. Donny gives Tom a
ride home in that fine car Mr. Don gave him as a birthday present until Tom transfers to
King. Donny is there. Donnys there when papers are served. Donnys in his own room
in the house on Chastant, a converted garage with Led Zeppelin both on the walls and the
stereo. Donny is there in his room while Mrs. Pat makes pudding on the stove. Donny is
there when Dougie or Dwayne opens the door and find his body, fifteen with a twenty-
two in his hands. The posters are ruined. The record is over, only a buzzing hum coming
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from the speakers and a wet iron smell in the air. They hadnt heard a thing. Nobody
had heard a thing.
From that point forward, Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there when they find the
note. The note that says he is failing math. The note that doesnt say he wants to live
with his father. Nor does it say that he doesnt want to live with his mother. Just that
hes failing math. Donny isnt there when his mother places that note on a small table in
the front room of the low, dark house on Chastant. Photos in frames. Prayer cards. A
candle. Other things. Donny isnt there that morning when my mother, unable to think
of a way to present the news, wakes my brother and says, Donny shot himself. Donny
isnt there that afternoon as Tom watches children chase each other around the pool at the
Jewish Community Center, splashing and skinning knees and elbows. Tom thinks about
the last time hed seen Donny. It was the week before, and Tom was driving towards
Avron down Chastant after buying smokes from Food Etc. Donny was in front of the
house, leaning against his car. Donny and Tom exchanged small talk about Brother
_______ at Rummel. The bathrooms at King. Other things unremembered. But now
Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there at the wake, but Donnys body is, dressed in a dark
suit with a crisp white collar. His face, the first dead body for many in that room, is a
mystery. How did they make him look so good? Where is the hole? Why an open
casket? Donny doesnt hear people say out loud thatparents should never have to bury
their children while thinking of reasons why and never finding them. Tom is on the left,
along with Dougie, Trey, and the others on the right, hoisting the heavy casket down the
steps. Each one hopes desperately not to slip, trying his best not to think about the
weight of the body inside, trying not to think about how heavy someone can be when he
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isnt even really there. Because Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there in the cemetery as
the sun shines off of the white-washed tombs and the broken brown glass littering the
cement corridors. Pigeons lighting on crosses.
Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there when his parents make a go of it. Not
because they still love each other, but because its what they think they should do.
Donny isnt disappointed when papers are signed anyway. Donny isnt there to help Mr.
Don pack his shirts and leisure suits, that bottle of Old Spice, an unopened carton of
Kools, and his cut crystal rocks glasses into boxes, and then those boxes into the car.
Donny isnt there to watch the brown stain form on the dry slide around the greening
pool. Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there to see the fragile smile on Mrs. Pats face
when she returns from her pilgrimage to Spain. The six-foot rosary of white beads with
the heavy iron crucifix that she gave my mother disappear into a closet in our own house.
Donny doesnt see the bottles disappear from the tiki bar in the backyard, the entire
house. Donny doesnt see bottles brought into Dwaynes room and stashed in the closet.
Donny doesnt see the brown paper bags full of dime sized Ziplocs. Weed cleaned and
rolled on the cover of a Nazareth album purchased at Warehouse Records and Tapes
along with the slim orange package of Zig-Zags. Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there to
see Dougie impress the shop teacher. Rebuild the carburetor. Bleed the brakes. Refinish
the body. Wire the stereo. Donny isnt there in the black and white pictures of Tom and
his friends leaning against one another at Pat OBriens during Mardi Gras. Hoisting cups
of Bud Light poured from plastic pitchers at Parlays. Stacking cans and playing quarters
on the coffee table in our converted garage when the parents went to Florida or Chicago.
Donny isnt there when anyone makes twenty-two.
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Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there when Dwayne passes out in the courtyard at
King, hitting the concrete with a wet smack. When Dwayne graduates a year late, saying
he needs a degree toget a good job, get my life back on track. Donny isnt there when
we hear that Dougie is doing well. A good job. A steady girl. A new house. Helping
Dwayneget right. Donny isnt there when Dougie follows his older brothers example.
A handgun? In the new house? Details are hard to come by. Glenn, Trey, and my
brother didnt talk to Dougie much. Donny isnt there to tell his brother not to do it, to
tell him that papers get served anyway, little brothers make mistakes, or that math really
doesnt matter.
Donny isnt there. Donny isnt there when another family fears things are bad. A
low spot in a childs life. The unraveling of a long relationship, a feeling that things are
going nowhere. She marries within a year, the restaurant folds. No more photos from the
courtyard at Pat OBriens, but still plenty of drinking. And Donny isnt there. Donny
isnt there to offer Tom an alternative to things that loom larger than the bullies at the bus
stop. Donny isnt there to sit on the curb at two a.m. after others move away or start
having children. Donny isnt there to ride shotgun to the Smoky Mountains to spend a
twenty-fifth birthday on the twenty-fifth of August. Donny isnt there. But I am. And
still am. Not for alcoholic fathers or for failing math, but for a pet that needed to be put
down at the vet. A ride home from work. A cold beer and some conversation about an
old friend who committed suicide.
2.
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Tom calls me for a ride. Some days I relish the call, because I need to get out of
the house. Some days it only means trouble for me. Some days he doesnt call me for a
ride. Tom calls me to borrow money. Just for the week. Until pay day. To float his rent
until pay day. But it will be a ride anyway, because I eventually say yes and he will
need the check immediately along with a ride to the bank. Tom calls me for a ride to
review his new lease. I take Tom into the bank to see customer service about removing
an overdraft fee. Tom buys me lunch at the Trailhead. Tom buys me beer with money I
know he doesnt have. I call Mom to tell her that I got the check she sent for his security
deposit. I call Mom to tell her that I will take him to see a dentist after he cracks open a
tooth while falling up the stairs to his third floor apartment. She thanks me for taking
care of him. Im his little brother. Hes three years older than I am. Hell be thirty-five
this year. In many ways I am relieved. I am glad to still be getting calls for rides. At one
time I didnt think that I would be getting these calls. At one time I thought that these
calls would stop. That one day I would wake up and find that Tom simply isnt there any
more, that there would be no more calls. I remember how my heart sank, sitting in that
little apartment I shared with Jenn on that Saturday night, when Tom called me for ride. I
already knew where he was calling from when I heard his voice. Can you come and get
me, he asked. They wont let me go unless someone comes and gets me. I first needed to
know what happened. I needed to know that nobody was hurt. I needed to know that he
hadnt hurt anybody.
Tom was lucky. He and his roommate T-Bone had left the Trailhead and walked
down to Toms little black pickup, and when he tried to pull away without his headlights
on the officer flashed her lights. Tom still lived in the little house on Wood at the time,
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was really only minutes away. It was inevitable. T-Bone walked home, but Tom was
taken to the station just around the block behind St. Josephs church. They wont let me
go unless someone comes and gets me. He sounded scared, but was holding it together
pretty well. I thought about letting him spend the night there. Let him sleep his drunk off
in the tank; let him walk home in the morning. I think about it in the car on the way to
get him because Im not brave enough to say no. When I come to collect him, he
smells like Rumple-Mintz. Jesus, Tom, I can smell you. Did you really think that you
were going to fool anybody? Then he starts in on how close he is to home, how he does
it all the time, how he would have been fine. I try to explain to him that he is putting
other people in danger, that somebody could get hurt. Tom pleads his case down to
Driving While Ability Impaired (DWAI) and I sometimes give Tom a ride to his alcohol
classes near the Lincoln Center downtown. After every class he walks straight to the
Trailhead. He walks home, although sometimes Tom calls me for a ride. Hell slur into
the receivercome on, Matt, Im really fucked up. Sometimes Im there beside him,
drinking, but I ride my bike home, myself more a possible target than a potential bullet.
Tom walks home most nights. He moved into a third floor apartment at 200 W. Laurel
St. a few months before Jenn and I moved out of the same building. He needs to be
closer to the bus route. Tom has no intention of getting a new drivers license. He knows
that if he tries to get one that they will find out he never completed his community
service. So Tom calls me for rides.
Im relieved to get them, precisely because Tom is thirty-five years old. I thought
Tom would be dead by thirty-two. I had set an expiration date on my brothers life, and I
chose thirty-two. I dont know why thirty-two. He was somewhere between twenty-six
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and twenty-eight when I came up with that number, although I cant remember exactly
when. Maybe it was around twenty-eight, when I was spending more time with Jenn than
with him. That would have been when all of his friends were starting careers and
families, his old crowd finally becoming adults. That would have been when he was left
with nothing but a couple of pill-popping drunks who liked to hit the Riverboat casino at
the Williams Boulevard boat launch along the lake in Kenner. They would get coked up
and get in fights. I didnt think Tom would make it, remembering the little mirror I found
in his gray Chevette back in high school. I could tell that he was lying about how much
money he was spending at the casinos. I cant ever bring myself to lie to my brother, and
maybe because of this I can always tell when Tom is lying to me. I would have been
fine. I make that drive all the time. He would have been driving home from Daiquiris
unable to see straight, the lights of that little black pickup weaving a little down Green
Acres, weaving a little along the canal full of night-herons and toads, right at Bissonet,
left on Irving, right onto Purdue Drive to pull into the driveway of his parents house, the
only son yet to leave the nest. But this was never how I saw it happening. I imagined
him in the alley outside some Fat City bar, maybe Uncle Larrys or Zeppelins, maybe
the building where our fathers office used to be, and hes drunk. Hes being manhandled
by some thick-fisted goombahs over borrowed money. Tom is thin, stooped, and alone.
I watch as they beat him unconscious and leave his cracked and bloody body on the
blacktop next to a dumpster full of rotting seafood, alone and unmoving.
Or maybe it was earlier, when he was around twenty-five, sometime after I moved
home after college or during the year right before. Maybe it was during the time he
moved out of our parents house, into the house that smelled like shitthe gassy stench
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of rancid sewer pipes rising from the central register in the hallway. Everything was
filthy, his roommate a well-meaning born-again Christian borrowing money to keep his
hack license, his cab often parked in front of Bills Seafood after hours for the open tap.
That house was a particularly sad place, and Tom started driving home from Daiquiris to
stay at Mom and Dads house rather than return to that awful house. The house sagged,
and the neighborhood kids would break in and steal Toms stuff. The girl Tom had been
dating for the last five years had broken up with him, and I guess he wanted to get out of
the house. Tom had been seeing her for the last five years and now found himself
passing her house everyday on the way home. She found Tom fun during school, her
long black hair always present in the photos from Parlays and Pat Os, one small hand
clutching a plastic cup, the other arm propping Tom up as the drunken mob leans in for
the shot. Things started to change as her friends started getting married to their
boyfriends; those boyfriends starting tile businesses, driving trucks, getting ASE
certified. Tom became something that needed to be fixed. He needed to change. He
tried as best as he could, failing two semesters of college to prove his love. Tom spent
more time in the Sandbar than in the classroom, swilling down light beer with my friends,
occasionally driving up to Baton Rouge to spend the night. He was horribly devastated
by the breakup, and felt only more betrayed when he found out that she married within
the year. Her house, with a new boat out in front, was along the route to that awful shit-
smelling house. He started driving home to Mom & Dads, instead of returning to that
awful house, his little black pickup truck with the Rumple-Mintz sticker turning out of
the Daiquiris parking lot and north onto Green Acres instead of south on
Transcontinental towards Metairie Road. Mom & Dad were worried when he started
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showing up at their house, sleeping on the floor because all of his stuff was at the shit
house, waking up the next day and going to work in the same clothes in which he had
slept. We all knew that it was the after-hours open tap on the keg of Budweiser that
creating the problem. Maybe Mom and Dad saw it as a small black truck in the canal or
wrapped around a streetlight. I dont think so. I think that Mom and Dad saw the same
thing that I did: a body on the bathroom floor, alone and unmoving. Maybe choked on its
own vomit, but more likely pills. A razor. A knife. Sometimes you dont know why you
feel something that you do, and we all felt it about Tommy. It went unspoken among us,
but I started coming home more on the weekends, moved in with my parents and met
Tom after work at Charitys in Fat City, still getting antsy years later whenever a few
days go by without talking to him. This is why I put his age at death at thirty-two. I
didnt think he would make it. This is why I am relieved when Tom calls me for a ride.
This is why I usually say yes.
There is tension in my house right now. My wife is angry because I lend my
brother money. She is angry because it directly affects us. Us, she says. But she feels
she doesnt have a say in the matter. Shes right; she doesnt. She thinks he drinks too
much. Shes right; he does. Like so many people, my wife probably looks at Tom and
sees a waste. Like so many people, maybe she looks at Tom and thinks that he needs to
be fixed. I know she thinks that he shouldnt have any help until he learns to help
himself. Thats not the way it works. Hes family, I tell her. Family takes care of one
another. If we dont, we might one day open the door to a bedroom full of the sick buzz
of flies, static from speakers being interrupted by the hiss and click of the turntable
needle repeatedly bouncing off the records end. In that room might be a body, broken,
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alone and unmoving. There might be a note for display on an end table shrine, along
with the gold dangle earring, the senior photo, the unfinished coconut ashtray from shop
class. A little brother left behind to lift a casket down church steps because he couldnt
be bothered to help.
One day Tom calls me for a ride and when I follow him upstairs, I watch as the
legs on his ferret, Chuck, continually slide out from under him. In the next few days
Chucks condition will worsen, a fatal cancer of the lymph system common in ferrets,
until the poor animal is dragging its hindquarters behind itself on the hardwood floors
like a dirty rag. I take Tom to my vet to have Chuck put down. Tom keeps stroking the
animal and kissing its forehead, apologizing for what he is about to do. He doesnt want
the animal to suffer any more. I pay to have the animal put down, pay to have the body
destroyed instead of thrown in a dumpster but decline to keep the ashes. Tom sits on one
of the chairs, rapidly bouncing one leg and trying not to make eye contact.
Alright, lets go, I say.
Thats it?, Tom asks.
Yeah. Thats it, I say.
Tom needs a cigarette and a beer, and everyone at the Trailhead makes a
sympathetic awww noise and sometimes places a shot of Rumple-Mintz in front of him.
Tom doesnt talk about Chuck. Instead, Tom wants to talk about Donny Willem, my first
dead body. Tom tells me about the last time he saw Donny.
3.
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Jenn and I know that we cant stay in Fort Collins. I am applying for jobs every
year. We are pregnant again and arent making enough money. We cant seem to make
ends meet, are too often buying groceries and gas on the credit card. During this
pregnancy, Tom moves out of the apartment on Laurel to live in a one-bedroom across
from the Trailhead. People help him stumble across the street, but usually leave him at
the door fumbling for his keys. One night he falls down the stairs, breaks his nose so
hard that he cant see straight for a few days. Everyone asks me what my brother is
going to do without me around if and when I move. I dont know, I answer.
Whenever I dont hear from my brother for a few days, I start thinking about
things I dont want to think about. I wonder if he is lying on the sofa at home, not
breathing, his heart and lungs exhausted, his arm nonchalantly resting across his forehead
as if he were only sleeping. Im afraid that hes been rolled by bums in the dark alley
between Matthews and Remington, eyes swollen shut, lips split, stabbed in the gut with a
penknife and left to bleed to death. I see a cracked and broken body at the base of the
stairs, alone and unmoving. But what disturbs me the most is when I wonder if he is just
sitting at home by himself, thinking about things he shouldnt be thinking about. Talking
to his cat about things he shouldnt do. Apologizing, as he always does. He is always
apologizing for something.
My biggest fear is that something will happen one day, and that people will heave
a sigh of relief. That there will be nothing to worry about anymore. That there will be no
more apologies.
Its the end of July and its hot outside, probably around 100 degrees. Tom will be
thirty-five in August, and has decided to move, packing up his one bedroom apartment
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for the studio in Old Town across from the Trailhead. His new place is non-smoking.
And starting in October, Fort Collins will join a handful of cities in banning smoking in
restaurants and bars. Tom decides to quit smoking. Now its humpday. They say all it
takes to quit is two weeks. Today is eight days, a week and a day without a smoke. Hell
kill for one today. Its the down time that gets to him. The times when hes not doing
anything, like riding in a car or walking between holes of a disc golf course. His leg
bounces. He chews a toothpick, a pen, anything. He gets crabby. Today we decide to
duck out after finishing the 6th hole. Its hot, clouds of flies hover in patches near the
ditch that cuts across the common. Tom needs a smoke. Hes been going all day and
hasnt really eaten anything.
We pass a new memorial. This area is filled with them. Trees. Benches. A
bridge. Everything has a bronze plaque attached to it. This one is a small fir, some
petunias, a juniper and some phlox, all mulched into a nice peanut shaped mound. The
plaque riveted to the rock reads: The Survivor Coalition, 2002. Tom gets crabby, a black
cloud settles over him, his face curling downward into a sneer. He starts badmouthing
the survivors. He refers to their failures, how they failed only because they didnt
succeed. He is contemptuous of the idea that depression is an illness, that some people
could not ask for help, that some people didnt think that they needed help. That those
people succeeded in going where we all thought he might have been thinking of going
once. Hell give up smoking for six weeks and start working at the Trailhead part-time.
When Jenn goes back to work at the Cupboard, Ill wheel Chloe and my new son,
Carter, downtown to the Trailhead when its time for lunch. Tom will make Chloe a
grilled cheese sandwich and well split some cheese fries and watch an afternoon football
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game. The job prospects are becoming more promising, and Tom needs to spend time
with Chloe. I want her to know her Uncle Tommy. He calls her by our pet name for her:
B. When we visit him at the studio across the street from the Trailhead, she dangles toys
for Sam, a cat from the animal shelter we visited several times, each visit to the shelter a
call for a ride. Now, when Tom calls for rides, I always say yes. Im trying to spend
time with my brother. Well be moving soon, and all I can tell people when they ask me
about Tom is I dont know.
Early during the same week I will move to Arizona, Tom calls me for a ride.
Tom calls for a ride to help him move his stuff into a new basement apartment across the
street from Aggie Liquor. He says that he knows he is drinking too much, that he is
getting too fucked up all the time, but he is hopeful that this new place, a good five city-
block trudge home from the bar, will help him to slow down. The night before we leave,
the last thing I drop off to him is a bunch of food from our kitchen and our plastic deck
chairs. Im sure Tom wants me to stay out that night,grab a few beers, but I have to get
my family to bed. We sleep on a blanket on the floor of an empty house that was never
ours in the first place, the carpet still damp from the steam cleaning earlier in the day.
Jenn wants to have one last breakfast at Avogadros Number, and Tom walks
down from his new place around the block to join us, to kiss the kids on their foreheads
and say his good-byes. I feel guilty, leaving him alone in Colorado, because Im the one
who moved him out here, who moved him out here to be with me, where I could keep an
eye on him. I felt the same way when I first moved out of our parents house for
Colorado, and again when I left him alone in a house so I could begin to share my life
with Jenn. Only this time Im not moving around the block or to the other side of the
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university, Im moving to Arizona. I dont like the idea of leaving him alone, one more
person abandoning him in part because we can no longer accommodate his lifestyle. One
more person in Toms life that he wont be able to call for a ride. One more person who
isnt there. Its nice to believe that Tom understands, that he knows that there are others
who require our time and attention; we have other responsibilities. Where does one
family end and another begin? We take a long time to eat breakfast, and Jenn starts to
cry when it is finally time to go. She hugs and kisses Tom, tells him to take care of
himself. The kids give him big squeezes. Tom and I try hard to keep our shit together,
hold tight to each other for what seems like too long, choke out a few words that I wont
recall, and then he turns and I watch him walk up the street without looking back. I climb
into the passenger side, unable to drive, my lip quivering. The car pulls away from the
curb and towards some kind of future for me, the future I have feared since that first dead
body in a dirty cemetery filled with pigeons and broken beer bottles. Once in the car, I
dont bother looking for Tom. I dont want to look. I dont want to look because Im
afraid that I wont see him, that he will already be gone, that Im too late, that I will turn
my head and find that Tom isnt there.
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