Wasted

“Odyssey” by Ani Assatourian

It was a party and anyone could go, only five bucks at the door to cover the beer. A frat party at a real frat house, Greek letters over the front door and varsity sweaters galore, but anyone, anyone, could go. My brother could go, who in his first six months of college had not heard a whisper about joining a fraternity, at least not concerning him or his roommate or any other people on his floor at the dorm. Did my brother wonder how they could discern he was not fraternity material by merely passing by him on campus? He was thin and birdlike, hollow-boned, a music major, a tenor in the men’s choir. People rarely paid any attention to him unless they wanted something from him—the hairstylist reaching under the plastic cape, a man staring pointedly in the public restroom, the fellow choir member standing on the next step behind him on the stage at practice, reaching down to massage his shoulders. Painfully polite, he would move away without acknowledging the overture. In moments like these, my brother would have preferred the comfort of invisibility.

But it was a party at a frat house and everyone was invited, the unattractive, the overweight, the invisible.  People were walking over, huddled groups of two, three, eight, already out and trudging through the snow, it was half past February in Ohio, the snow piled up in drifts seven feet high. A guy could reasonably wear clothes that made a person look more substantial—long underwear stuffed into jeans—thickening legs, enhancing calf muscles—and a bulky flannel shirt that gave my brother broad shoulders. Big, black boots. Thick gloves. A fucking lumberjack! A kick-ass biker dude! Not, as my brother’s roommate Tom suggested, one of the goddamn Village People, no, not at all, everyone was dressed this way, he was no different than anyone else. It was cold, cold, cold, and when my brother and Tom got to the frat house, my brother’s fingers were so numb, even after being encased in gloves, he could barely fish the five-dollar bill from his jeans. Someone laughed and my brother blushed, color rising, hot embarrassment drawn up the skinny syringe of his neck, so his entire face filled with red to match his chapped nose.

He had orange hair and freckles, my brother, and his nose was often scarlet. In the summer it was from hay fever and sunburn; in the winter it was sinus infections and freezing cold. My brother liked to wear hats; he owned but did not take to college, a silky black top hat which collapsed into a pancake, a straw boater with a red-and-white striped ribbon he would perch on top of his head at an angle, a Panama hat with a stained brown sweatband, a safari hat equipped with a battery-operated fan in the crown, a newsboy’s cap, a Peter Pan hunting cap with a white feather, a beret, a bowler, a fedora, and a fez. On the cold night of the party in Ohio he wore his black watch cap, the kind New Jersey longshoremen wore. He had it pulled down low so it covered his ears and his pale eyebrows. Inside, the frat house was warm, and someone plucked the knitted cap off my brother’s head. 

“I need a beer,” my brother said as the stranger disappeared with his cap. Did Tom tell this to me later or did I make it up? Did my brother’s feet feel heavy and slow in the clunky boots? Did he already regret coming? 

The newspapers all mentioned he was unaccustomed to drinking. He was more accustomed to watching others drink. When my brother and I were kids, we would visit our father's apartment every other weekend, two nights and two days watching our dad sit drinking in his recliner, tilting back in increments, and slipping away from us. After he fell asleep in front of the television, we would drain the remains of his cans. Our dad liked hard cider, it didn’t make him feel as bloated as beer, he said. It tasted like apple juice to my brother and me, apple juice gone bad. Apple juice with attitude, a black leather jacket, and a cigarette dangling from its lips. Our dad didn’t leave much in those cans. But we knew what drunk looked like. We went outside to the apartment’s playground and spun ourselves around until we were so dizzy we couldn’t walk, tripping over the broken swings, stumbling blindly into the fence, bonking our heads on the edge of the rusted metal slide, falling into the grass and lying there, smiling, faces up, blissful.

My brother and Tom found kegs being operated in the kitchen. They were handed red plastic cups, half beer, half foam. A lot of people came in and out of the kitchen; no one remembered seeing my brother. The house was packed with students. Music blasted from somewhere deep inside.

My brother and his roommate stayed in the kitchen for maybe an hour. It was difficult for Tom to say how long they stood there as the clock above the stove was stopped at 3:20. Tom could not remember much of their conversation nor could he remember how many beers they drank. Four, maybe five, mostly foam, barely anything. Overhead, fluorescent tubes bathed everyone who entered the kitchen in icy light. Young girls came in and removed their heavy coats and hats, revealing swaths of bare midsections, earrings tangled in their hair. My brother and Tom leaned against a sticky kitchen counter and drank solemnly. The music vibrated the cabinet doors above their heads. 

Then a fraternity brother, tall, muscular, blue-eyed, blond, an entirely different subspecies than my brother, turned from filling cups to glare at the two and growled at them to, “Stop staring at me, faggots,” so my brother and Tom stepped into a dark hallway and made their way towards the center of the house.

There was a girl sitting two steps up in a stairwell. She was crying. An apocalyptic mound of coats and jackets and scarves and gloves and hats was scattered under the banister, leaving a narrow pathway on the stairs to the second floor.  My brother and Tom laid their own coats on the pile. The next morning, there would be any number of items remaining on the stairs. It happened all the time, people leaving belongings–coats, hats, purses, panties, eyeglasses, orthodontia, and, famously, a glass eye. Sometimes students came to retrieve their things, most of the time they did not. The frat boys kept what they liked and piled the rest in the yard, kindling for bonfires.  

Later that girl thought she remembered him but I doubt it.  Sometimes I can't recall what he looked like exactly. One by one I can see his features like puzzle pieces—a bit of blue eye, the orange hair, a colorless eyebrow. I have to look at photographs to put him all together again—his tiny school pictures, the only ones our mom could afford, thrown in an envelope in the filing cabinet along with my own. The Christmas when he was seven and I gave him a pitch pipe. In that photo, he holds the silver saucer to his lips, like he’s about to bite it like a hamburger. His high school graduation picture of the two of us, side by side, with our terse smiles, my arm over his shoulders, his head slightly bowed, as if he’s sheltering against me. I should have paid more attention.

A strobe light in the living room beckoned, off-on, off-on, and people were dancing, people falling, people grinding against each other. More people sat on the couches, legs entwined. A boy doing jumping jacks on a coffee table. The wall of noise, screams, laughter, music, chanting must have slammed into my brother like a physical force, taking his breath away for a moment. A bottle was thrust into his hands and he drank from it and passed it on. 

When the bottle came around again, the same bottle, another bottle, my brother took a drink and when he passed it on, he did his own version of a river dance, arms dangling lifeless by his sides, his feet shuffling, knees lifting imperceptibly, the kind of dance you might do when you think someone might be watching and judging you, though only Tom noticed it. I imagine he wished he had one of his hats, probably the fez with the tassel. A silly hat, perfect for frat parties.

It was after the dance that Tom stepped away from my brother. He hadn’t meant to leave my brother forever, he said. He was just putting some distance between himself and the dance. He liked my brother. He did. They’d been roommates for six months and they’d gotten used to each other in the way two people forced to share a cramped space get used to each other, stepping widely around one another. Tom thought my brother was quiet. Dancing jigs was totally cool with Tom though not at frat parties with a bunch of glowering Neanderthals roaming the house. And who had made Tom responsible for my brother?  

What was true for Tom was probably true for me. When my brother and I lay flat on our backs in the sun pretending to be drunk, I would sneak away when his eyes were closed. I would leave him exposed to the world. It wasn’t cruelty. It was a form of self-preservation. The vulnerable feel especially contagious to those only one step further down the ladder. 

Tom walked away and he didn’t look back. Did my brother notice? Not immediately, I imagine. Besides he’d been left alone his entire life. It probably felt perfectly natural to look around and realize he was on his own. He had patience. He trusted that someone would come back. 

There are hours and hours missing here, how many hours no one is sure. In cases like these, especially with young people, someone remembers the dead as their very best friends. Or someone recalls a significant moment they shared.  But this is not the case with my brother. No one can account for him until approximately two in the morning, the hour at which my brother had a brief encounter with a boy named Peter Walsh. Peter was entrusted with a job for the evening, party bouncer. It must have been a joke, him being bouncer. Peter was only slightly bigger than my brother. 

For the majority of the evening, Peter’s attempts at keeping order had not been successful. One fellow stuffed him in the hall closet. A girl poured a drink on his head. He had no backup from his frat brothers. 

I can picture Peter, humiliated, his sticky hair plastered to his forehead, patrolling the house for signs of trouble, for miscreants, enforcing unwritten house rules. He discovered my brother asleep on the floor, nestled against a bookcase in the library. There were other people in the room in various prone positions, but according to Peter my brother was a fire hazard blocking the exits. Peter pulled my brother to his feet and told him to leave. Goosestepped my brother to the door.

Hence my brother was escorted out sans coat. Sans hat. Peter later claimed he had ejected many, many people from the party. He didn’t remember my brother specifically. It could have been anyone. It could have been someone else.  

***

So now what? Do I end there? Do I give you the research I did on freezing to death? Do I provide the clinical facts—men are more susceptible than women, adults more than children, a person who has been drinking the most susceptible of all?  Do those facts help or hinder the emotional impact?

Or do I tell you what I know for certain about my little brother’s death? That the night had been clear. Eleven degrees. A billion cold stars shining down like so many silent witnesses.

They found him the next morning a dozen yards from the frat house, where he had wandered off the snow-covered path, stumbled, and fallen. He lay on his back, his chin tilted up to the sky, smiling slightly as if he was aware of how silly he was being. Like he trusted, someone, maybe even his sister, would come back to make sure he was all right.

about the Author

L. L. Babb has been a teacher for the Writers Studio San Francisco and on-line since 2008. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the West Marin Review, Cleaver, The San Francisco Chronicle, The MacGuffin, Good Life Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart anthology for her short story, “Where Have You Been All Your Life.” Lorraine lives deep among the trees of Forestville, CA with her husband Cornbaby Johnson, her dog Smudge, and her cat Cosmo.

about the artist

Self-taught abstract artist, Ani Assatourian, based in Los Angeles, captivates viewers with her multi-layered and mysterious works. Through a journey of personal exploration and creative experimentation, she has developed a unique style that defies conventional boundaries. Her intricate compositions invite audiences to delve into a world of enigmatic forms and subtle textures, each piece offering a new discovery with every glance. Balancing intuition and intentionality, Ani creates art that resonates on a deeply emotional level, challenging perceptions and evoking a sense of wonder. Her paintings have been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally, earning her recognition and acclaim in the contemporary art scene.