Who Is Paul Botterman?

VIII

Old Flame. The Nomad.

The world was supposed to end in 2012. And I welcomed it. You can imagine my disappointment with the Mayans.

Life collapsed around me after my mother died in December of '10. We all suffer grief, but whatever disease had infected the best of us came clawing its way out like some dormant parasite that had been gestating in our dark viscera while we lived in the sun. I had begun stacking cocaine on top of my booze, jumping from one fling to another in shame as I had been such a hypocrite to Pete in those days, and overall self-destructing the same as anyone stumbling in the dark mysteries of trauma. Pete managed to get himself in enough of a jam that not even our dad could bail him out this time. The fucking idiot somehow got hold of a gun. The same weapon they would find after some kid in another shitty rival gang took six bullets to the chest. Lucky for him, there was honor among his tribe as someone confessed, but that didn't change he was an accomplice to murder and landed himself in the minimum security unit at King's Fall for a year before he got transferred to Alexander State on good behavior to serve out the rest of his five-year sentence as an accessory after the fact. My failure in him and my disgust made me not participate in any of his court hearings or say goodbye when he was sentenced. My last words to him were something along the lines of an apology I found to be empty. Dad fills me in with how everyone is doing when I make the weekly phone call. I guess Pete isn't having a good go of it on the inside. Supposedly, he wants to change for the better now that he's hit the very bottom. I hope that's true for his sake.

Annette, we found, had been suffering from severe depression and ended up seeing a shrink twice a week with a little more of a résumé than the ones she saw prior who thought you could treat demons with light talks and heavy drugs. The only thing I got out of Dad was that the things that happened in Florida had finally surfaced in her, and she was broken more than she let us know. The worst thing I could tell was that she turned to cutting and making bad decisions, no different from her older brothers. Some of us turned toward dope. The others found safety in a razor.

As far as I could tell, Jack was still young and on a relatively normal path. The few chances I got with him, I told him not to follow me or Pete down into the gutter. He had enough evidence around him to know where it landed you. Not that he really saw me as having been much of a bad influence. I wasn't on the same path to prison as Pete had been. One lucky cop pulling me over for a tail light changed my fortunes in a hurry. What made Jack so fortuitous than the rest of the family was that he was dumb and seemed to get dumber as he got older. There was hope somewhere. He could barely remember putting one foot before the other. We all just prayed what we remembered in our rotten cores had skipped the little guy.

My breaking point came when I found out Marissa was doing blow and other stuff from the same dealer where I got all my shit. The little girl who once called me Riley Chuck was well on her path of self-imposed damnation. Our falling out hadn't been pretty. I don't care to share the details as it took enough out of my soul to see her unknowingly following in my steps. And my being powerless to stop it was no different than I could with Pete.

And our poor father, who had lost his wife twice. Was a husk that drifted through life. I was aware enough to know that the kids still in the Taylor house were in capable hands. Maybe not the best, but definitely not the worst. Some of those days, I would sit at the kitchen table and watch him while he did whatever he pretended to be doing to fill the hollow on the inside. You know how you look at a person and get the feeling that no one is home? That was Dale Taylor in 2011. Existing only because he had his kids as an excuse. But thank God, it bought him some time.

Even with everything that I just told you. It still wasn't what got me to get up and go. The process by which I had made the decision wasn't quite sound. Still, it was very much selfish as I wanted to get away from them when I knew I would inevitably finish off the job I started when I got home in the summer of '05. You don't need a gun, or pills, or a rope to do it. No razors are required. All you needed was a little patience, which I didn't have, but it was a better replacement for being a coward.