How to Lose Everything Read online

  He grinned.

  “Hey man,” I said, making an effort to look serious, “how are you doing cash-wise? Wanna borrow some money? I'm loaded right now.”

  I didn't wait for his answer, just handed him five bills. All I had left now was a single hundred-mark bill in my wallet. It might seem dumb to go to all those lengths and then still hold on to some of the cash, but it was a hundred marks, and that was still a lot of money. The five bills disappeared into Daniel's wallet. With that done, we sat and played Streetfighter 2. Daniel won.

  “C-c-can you bring some money with you?”

  Sam's voice rattled like a faulty car engine.

  “I still need c-c-cash for beer and other s-stuff.”

  “I've hardly got any left,” I answered. “And what ‘other stuff'?”

  “Eric has, E-Eric has, E-, I shouldn't talk about it like this.” He was whispering through the receiver.

  “Are you serious? Why are you whispering? Sam?”

  More low noises.

  “Sam? I didn't catch that.”

  The sound was replaced by the dial tone. He'd hung up. Why had he been whispering? It had been Eric and Schulz's idea to have a little party at Sam's place. They'd suggested that he have a “session,” and Sam had gone along with the idea. Once we'd made the plan, though, all three of us had each told other people about it, so now Sam didn't have any idea how many people were actually planning on coming over later that night. (His parents were on vacation in Italy, on Lake Garda, where they went every summer. Sam had been home alone for a week.)

  Sam's parents' house was pretty far away, on a street at the edge of town that only had houses on one side. On the other side was a cornfield, where the corn was now taller than we were. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining diagonally through the plants' deep green leaves. It seemed like vacation had just started. In a few weeks the field would be harvested, and then summer would be over.

  Behind the field, back toward the woods, there was an old barn. That was where Sam and I had gone to smoke our very first cigarettes together. He'd made fun of me because I had just puffed on them instead of inhaling into my lungs. After chain-smoking three, I'd felt sick and thrown up on the wall of the barn. We laughed about it now.

  I opened the short cast-iron gate and walked up the driveway and over to the patio. Eric was sitting in a rickety, brightly patterned lawn chair. His feet were on a footstool, and he was almost lying down. Only his right arm was up, supported by the back of the chair, to hold a cigarette. Schulz was sitting next to him with his Ray-Bans on. My pulse sped up when I saw him. I was glad I couldn't see his eyes. I'd been avoiding him ever since my thing with Lena, but he didn't know anything, he couldn't know anything. It was our secret.

  With a smile on his face, Eric held out his hand for me to shake. On the table was a bag of weed, slightly smaller than the one from the park in Munich, and next to it was a palm-sized clump of hash and a small bag with a pile of little red tablets inside. They were about the size of aspirin and had a symbol on them that I didn't recognize. There was also a packet with little blue capsules that looked like hard candy.

  “What's that?” I asked, pointing to the bag with the red pills.

  Schulz giggled.

  “That's E,” said Eric with a grin.

  “And those?”

  Schulz emitted a sudden burst of laughter, with little drops of spit darting out of his mouth. Then it turned into a tinny laugh. Hekhekhekhekhekhek. Eric joined in, too, less annoyingly. He stretched out further in the lawn chair.

  “They're microdots.”

  “Microdots?”

  Eric nodded.

  “Okay . . . What are microdots?”

  Schulz was laughing so hard he grabbed his stomach. His skinny body was shaking and contorting.

  “Microdots,” said Eric, laughing. “Microdots are like tickets, but stronger.”

  “Tickets?”

  “LSD, retard.”

  “Whatever. Where's Sam?”

  Schulz could hardly breathe.

  “Sam's in kind of a weird mood,” said Eric. “First of all, he took three—” Hekhekhekhekhekhek. He was interrupted by another roar of laughter from Schulz. “First of all, he took three microdots.”

  “Three,” Schulz cackled. “He had three! Three!”

  “He took three microdots and then he went upstairs and pulled down all the blinds. We don't know why. The whole time he was muttering about something, but we couldn't understand him.” Okay, I thought, that explains things.

  I went through the patio door and into the house. Schulz's laughter grew quieter. In the living room, CDs and clothes were scattered all around the floor. I picked up a Doors CD and put it on. Outside, Schulz was still cackling. “When summer's gone, where will we be?” Jim Morrison sang—hekhekhekhek. It felt like we were in a movie and this was the soundtrack: Eric, Sam, Schulz, me—we were all like actors who did what we did because it was in the script. And now, here in Sam's house, with the Doors playing—somehow it all fit together. Except it was sort of sad and fucked up. You always want everything to be like in a movie, but when it happens, then you just want to go back to normal again. At least that's what I wanted because here, now, it was all too much for me.

  The kitchen was a mess. Beer and wine bottles were everywhere, along with pizza boxes and ice-cream cartons. It stank. Over by the staircase it was already dark. I had to turn the lights on. Clothes were strewn over the stairs: T-shirts, boxer shorts, Sam's Yankees cap. When I got to the top, I went to Sam's room. The blinds were all down, and the room would have been pitch black except for a candle stub burning in the middle. It was light enough for me to see that Sam wasn't there. In the next room, his parents' bedroom, it was the same: The room was dark except for a small candle. Even the bathroom had a candle in it.

  Someone had scrawled something on the mirror with a marker, but I couldn't make it out. The words didn't make any sense. Back in the hallway, I could hear him. He came toward me, but he didn't see me. His head was lowered, and he was carrying a candle and a lighter, whose wheel he kept spinning, making little sparks spray out. He hissed, muttered, and whispered. He smelled like he hadn't showered in days.

  I called his name. He didn't react; it was like he hadn't heard me.

  “Sam!” I said again. He muttered, but still didn't respond. He acted like he was talking to someone who wasn't there. I grabbed his arm. Gently, but firmly. His upper body jerked as if I'd interrupted him during an important task. His head snapped up, but he seemed to look straight through me.

  “Sam!” I said.

  Slowly, very slowly, his eyes began to focus on me. It seemed to dawn on him gradually.

  “What are you doing? What's with the candles and the blinds?”

  He hissed something at me. It sounded like “vshshsst.”

  “What?”

  He did it again. “Vshshsst.”

  Then he muttered, almost coherently, “Leave me alone.” He turned his back to me, and I could see dust and bits of wax on his jacket. I wanted to stop him, but I realized that I probably couldn't make any difference. It was like he wasn't even there. He kept arranging candles and talking to the creatures in his own horrible world. I went down the steps, through the living room, and back onto the patio, into the open, the fresh air, the sun. Schulz and Eric were still in the same spot, smoking cigarettes. I sat down between them, took a beer from the box, and started rolling a joint.

  “Why did you let him take so much?” I asked.

  “What do you want me to do?” Eric said. “I was just being nice!”

  Schulz burst into laughter again.

  “He saw them and stuffed three of them in his mouth. I told him, ‘Sam, just take one.' But he wanted three. There was nothing we could do to stop him. He was totally nuts about it.”

  “I think he's lost it. He doesn't respond when you talk to him.”

  “Just let him spin out a little. He'll come down soon.”

  “
What if he doesn't?”

  “Then he should drink milk. Or take vitamin C. That'll make you come down. That's what Zafko does, and he knows what he's doing with that shit.”

  I turned and looked at Schulz. He was still giggling to himself. He wasn't good enough for Lena. Anyone who could sit there with a pair of three-hundred-mark sunglasses and giggle to himself for half an hour was a total retard.

  So we sat there for an hour or two: Schulz giggled, Eric smiled, I stewed in my anger and frustration, and the sun slowly sank into the cornfield.

  The cast-iron gate creaked and Lena came through. She was wearing a short black summer dress, the same one she'd been wearing when I'd seen her at the train station. Her friend Sarah was with her. They came to the patio and noticed Eric's smorgasbord of drugs.

  “What the hell is all this?” Lena asked, pointing to the table. She didn't look at me or Schulz. He'd stopped giggling by now.

  “Oh, that was just sitting there when we got here,” said Eric, without the slightest change in his king-on-a-throne attitude.

  “Right.”

  Sarah took a bottle of Kahlua out of her handbag, and the two of them went to get glasses from the filthy kitchen. I watched them when they came back. Maybe if I hadn't smoked any pot, I could have gone over to them, said something witty, made them laugh, and then sat with them. But that was pretty much out of the question. It was sure to go wrong. My tongue felt like a piece of chalk, and even if I thought of something interesting to say—or, better yet, something funny—they wouldn't understand it, and they'd have to ask me to repeat it, and I would have to give the punch line again, and then it would be completely ridiculous and embarrassing . . . Anyway, Schulz would see us. When I looked at him, my thoughts got all tangled up.

  By about midnight the yard was filled with twenty or so people. Even Carina was there. I guess Daniel had invited her. She gave me a little nod when she saw me, and I nodded back. I thought it would be better not to talk to her. Jim, the punk kid, was lighting a fire on the compost heap. He'd found a gasoline container in the garage and was sprinkling the contents over the rotted food and yard waste. It wouldn't be long before he'd start in on his standard battle cry: “Anarchy! Anarchy!”

  Small groups of kids sat on the gradually dampening grass and drank. Daniel lounged for hours in a chair next to Schulz and Eric, smoking. Someone brought the stereo speakers onto the patio, and now a Snoop Dogg album was reverberating through the yard and the cornfield. Which, when you thought about it, was kind of strange, considering that Snoop Dogg lived in South Central LA, and here we were in front of a cornfield in a suburb of Munich. Eric and Schulz hadn't said anything for the last hour. They just stared into the clear night sky with their mouths hanging open or laughed about something that only they understood. I watched Schulz's face. He didn't look at me. He didn't know. He couldn't know. It probably wouldn't matter to him anyway. If Lena meant anything to him, he wouldn't be sitting on a stupid lawn chair, tripping. That's what I told myself. If he really loved her, he would talk to her, take care of her, make her laugh. They hadn't said a single word to each other the whole night. Their relationship was broken, and I had just sped up the process.

  Lena and Sarah were talking with two guys I'd never seen before. I looked around and realized that I actually only knew half the people there.

  “Who are all these people?” I asked Daniel. “Like those guys over there.” I pointed to the two guys talking to Lena. “I've never seen them before.”

  Daniel shrugged.

  “No idea. Maybe Lena brought them, or maybe Sam invited them. Where is Sam, anyway?”

  I didn't know. I hadn't seen him for hours. He hadn't come outside, even though this was supposed to be his party. We'd forgotten all about him. No one cared, as long as there was enough music, alcohol, and whatever else. A couple of times I heard people asking why the whole second floor was dark.

  There was a loud, hollow bang. Girls screamed, Schulz jumped, and Eric sprang out of his chair. All of a sudden the yard was lit up. Flames shot three feet into the air. Someone shouted, “You maniacs!”

  “Anarchy!” Jim yelled.

  “Fucking punk!” someone shouted. The compost heap was a huge fireball. Schulz whimpered, scrunched up in a ball in an LSD-fueled haze. People freaked out at first, but as the initial anxiety subsided, everyone thought it was pretty awesome, too.

  Eric stood in front of his chair, gaping. It took a few seconds for him to realize what was happening. Then he sat back down to enjoy the show. Two girls danced around the fire. A couple of drunk guys started chanting, and Jim positioned himself as close as possible to the flames and sprinkled more gas onto it.

  I don't really know why I stood up just then. It wasn't like me to do something like that—to join in, I mean. I stumbled over to Lena and Sarah and the two guys. In the corner of the yard the blaze flared. I could feel the heat. They fell silent when I got there. The two guys were a full head taller than me, and they must have been at least five years older. They wore collared shirts under their sweaters. Their jeans fit perfectly, not an inch too big, and on their feet were shiny black leather shoes. Awkwardly, I reached for Lena's hand. I didn't care if Schulz saw. Let them all see, Schulz, Eric, Carina, and especially this douchebag standing next to her. She pulled her hand away.

  “We were just about to leave.”

  “Who's we?”

  The two guys looked me up and down.

  “Alex and Dave are taking us to Nightflight.”

  “‘Alex and Dave'? Are you serious?”

  One of them said, “Lena, this guy's wasted. Let's go.”

  “I'm not wasted . . . you fucking douchebag,” I said.

  He took a step toward me. I took a step back. He suddenly looked even taller. His friend grabbed his shoulder and said something quietly that I didn't hear.

  “Leave him alone, Dave. He's drunk,” said Lena.

  “I'm not drunk! Who is this guy, anyway?”

  “We're leaving. Don't make a scene,” she said.

  “You're leaving with these homos? Who are they? Where do you know them from?”

  “Lena,” said the other one, “I'm not about to take crap from some drunk kid. I've got better things to do.”

  Lena grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away.

  “I told you before: What happened the other day was a one-time thing, okay? You're a nice guy, but nothing's ever going to happen between us. Got it? I'm sorry I have to say it like that. But you don't seem to get it. Dave's a nice guy and he's gonna get us into Nightflight, so just leave it alone. Okay?”

  “Fucking assholes!”

  The four of them got into a black Jeep Wrangler. At first I was just going to leave it, but then something came over me, and I ran down the driveway and after the Jeep as they pulled away. After a few yards, I stopped and flung my beer bottle at the car, even though only the taillights were still visible. It shattered on the asphalt.

  I went back. Just as I pulled the cast-iron gate shut behind me, another car pulled up and parked in front of the house. A police car. Two middle-aged officers, both in black leather jackets, got out. One of them had a thick moustache. They came straight toward me.

  “Can I see some ID?”

  I pulled my ID out of my wallet, which still had the old hundred-mark bill in it. While one cop took my ID back to the car, the other asked me if this was my party. I said no.

  “We've had a complaint about the noise. And,” he paused, his gaze coming to rest on the bonfire. “And it looks like we might also have a case of arson. Oliver!” he called to his partner. “Call the fire department. We've gotta get that put out.”

  He turned back to me. “Whose party is this?”

  “My friend's. Sam's,” I answered meekly.

  “Does Sam have a full name?”

  “Samuel Meyer.”

  “And where is Samuel Meyer?”

  I pointed to the house. “Um, inside somewhere.”

  His partner gave
me my ID back.

  “No history,” he said.

  “Okay. Let's go talk to Mr. Meyer.”

  As I walked back into the yard with the cops, chaos broke out. Joints were extinguished, beers were poured out over the fire (which did absolutely nothing to diminish it), couples stopped making out, liquor bottles landed in the shrubs—the party was over. On the patio, Eric was tucking bags into his pockets. The police headed straight toward him.

  “Are you Samuel Meyer?” the one with the moustache asked Eric.

  “Nope,” answered Eric. “Are you?”

  Daniel giggled.

  The cop looked at Eric. “Get your ID out.”

  The one with the moustache positioned himself on the patio, turned to the drugged-up crowd, and said loudly, “We're looking for Samuel Meyer. Can he please step forward.”

  Some people started whispering but no one answered.

  “Samuel Meyer!” the cop called again. Then he got angrier: “If no one steps forward, then we'll take down information for everyone here. Including all those who are underage. Which one of you is Samuel Meyer?”

  Silence.

  Eric was still fishing for his ID, doing his best to keep the contents of his pockets from spilling out.

  “He's upstairs,” said Daniel.

  “What?”

  “I think he's upstairs,” Daniel repeated.

  “Why don't you come with us, too.” He looked suspiciously at Daniel, clearly noticing how small he was. “And let's see some ID.” Daniel pulled out his license. After looking it over, the cops headed upstairs. Daniel followed. So did I.

  The entire floor was dark except for flickering candles. “What's going on up here?” the mustached one asked. We didn't answer.

  They went from door to door, opening them and shining their flashlights in. It was clear they weren't too impressed.

  They found Sam in the bathroom. He was crouched down in the bathtub with a knife in his hand, waving it around like he was fighting demons or something. Except for the knife, he looked completely harmless; completely helpless.