Aftermath

Part XVII: Tommy

I watched helplessly as Adam stormed out of my apartment.  Couldn’t he see that I was only trying to help?  But then again, I saw myself in him as he was drowning in his pain.  I was the exact same way—maybe worse—when my father died, and I didn’t want to have a thing to do with anyone, even Adam, for the longest time.  I didn’t perform at any of our gigs for weeks; luckily Adam found a temporary replacement.  Would it be the same way with Adam?  How many appearances would we have to cancel, and for how long?  Granted, we still had about two weeks left of our break, but I wasn’t sure if that would give him enough time to grieve.

In a daze, I got up from the couch, righted the overturned chair and rearranged the scattered books.  When I stood from my crouched position, I gagged and a cry rolled out of me.  Salty droplets slid down my cheeks and dripped off my jaw and chin, freefalling onto my neck and rolling down from there.  I suppose that this reaction was merely from the shock of what had happened only three hours ago.  I knew the worst was yet to come.

I didn’t sleep that night; I was too shaken from the day’s events, and I couldn’t stop thinking about where Adam might be.  Would his eruption seal the fate of our relationship?  Or was it just the beginning of his grieving process?  Even though we’d been together for over two years, I still wasn’t sure of how his mind worked, how he’d react in certain situations.  Well, this proved to me that, for him, the aftermath of traumatic occurrences began with a violent rage.

At one point during the night, I was tempted to call him, just to make sure that everything was alright, that wherever he was, he was safe.  I was afraid that I would receive a phone call from a drunken Adam—which is most definitely not a good thing—at four in the morning.  The last thing I wanted to do was haul my ass out to a trashy East LA gay bar in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately, what I’d feared the most happened around five a.m.  He called me up, barely able to put together a coherent sentence and he couldn’t even tell me where the hell he was.  So I talked to the bartender and then left to pick him up.  He was so messed up; I practically had to carry him out to the car, and trust me, that was no easy task.

Once I had him strapped into his seat, before we took off, I asked, “Adam, what the hell is the matter with you?!  You should know better than to go off and get yourself so wasted that you can’t even walk.  You know, I shoulda just left you here…”

“Stop yelling,” he whined, his head flopped to the side.  “I was havin’ a good time!”

“Yeah, I bet you were,” I muttered as I started the car and drove out of the parking lot.  I didn’t drive too fast; the last thing I wanted was for him to suddenly get carsick all over the leather interior of my almost brand-new Lexus.  “First we fight, then you go out and get completely smashed, and now you tell me that you were ‘having a good time.’  I’m sure you did.  So, uh, how many guys did you make out with?” I asked casually.

“Uhhh, this many,” Adam slurred, holding up four fingers.

I shook my head.  I doubted he was telling the truth.  My guess is, he probably couldn’t even remember his own name right now, so I just took everything he said with a grain of salt.  The minute we pulled up to my apartment complex, I hefted my inebriated boyfriend out of the passenger seat and dragged him to the front door.  We took the elevator up to my apartment and I brought him to the bedroom, where I dumped him on the bed.  Just then, he opened his glassy, bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Back at my apartment.”  I tugged off his snakeskin boots, preparing to tuck him into bed.  “Jesus, you are gonna have such a hangover in the morning.”  I said this more to myself than to him.