But one night I do some coke at a stupid birthday party for one of my old drug friends. I walk into the apartment and everyone’s high already and I smell it and I see it on their faces and I want it too because this is the land of no repercussions, this community, this group of people, this loft in the nethers of Bushwick. I don’t even do that much, and I leave before midnight and things can get too dangerous, but then I’m up, I’m fucked. I take a Valium to bring myself down, but it doesn’t work—or it works, but it works against me, and I’m racked with terrible sleep. I have a nightmare right before I wake. I’ll spare you the specific plot because listening to other people’s dreams is boring, but my dead father was in it. I hadn’t thought about him in a while, had actually been actively rejecting thoughts about him for no apparent reason, although if I really pushed myself into a deep kind of consideration about the matter it might have had something to do with a sense of failure and discontentment with my own existence and my fear of mapping that to his personal trajectory, but that’s just a guess! An uneducated, bitter, depressed guess. Anyway, there he is, not being particularly threatening or anything, but definitely not friendly either. He’s sort of this light blue color, and he’s sitting in the recliner with his legs stretched out on the ottoman, a dream, a nightmare, a ghost, all at once.
It scares the shit out of me. I wake up immediately and focus on the room, looking for reality, a steadiness, a center. I stare at the recliner. It’s then that I realize that this is the chair where my father overdosed. It was his favorite place to sit, after all. He nodded off there frequently. He died in our living room while I was at school. He was listening to jazz; my mother had mentioned that much. She had never specifically stated where he died. But of course it was in this chair. And now, in my own home, I had napped on that chair. Flipped through the Sunday paper while lounging on it. A few times I had sex on it, not intercourse sex, but oral sex, both given and received. Sex on my father’s death chair. Cool gift, Mom.
I call my mother to confirm the truth. She doesn’t answer. I leave her a message. For weeks she doesn’t return my call, and when she does, I’m on the train to work, which means I can’t actually pick up, which means she gets to leave a message. All she says is “Honey, if you don’t want the chair then just throw it out.”
I call my brother. “Mom gave me the chair Dad died in,” I tell him. “And you took it? She tried to give it to me, too,” he says. “Well, I didn’t know what it was,” I say. “I guess I blocked it out.” That is a thing I’ve been known to do, and my brother doesn’t argue the point. “I’ve had nightmares about it,” he says. “Just toss it.” “Like in the garbage?” I say. “Andrea, just throw it away,” he says.
But I understood why my mother held on to it for so long, and also why she felt like she had to hand it off to someone instead of putting it in the garbage. It was Dad’s chair. So I decide to sell it on Craigslist, that way I know where it’s going. I look up the value of the two pieces online. The set is worth about a thousand dollars. On a Saturday morning, I list it for two-fifty. Priced to move. Looking for a good home. P.S., my father died in it.
A number of people reply to the ad, and I give them all my address because I feel insane. I buy a bottle of wine, and I buzz in anyone who shows up. There’s a young couple, early twenties, fresh off the train from a private college in Maine, and they’re furnishing their first apartment together, and they’re so young and full of hope and I hate them and send them on their way. There’s a woman named Adele who works in advertising, and she’s snobby and looks me up and down and she actually gets on her hands and knees and inspects the chair from underneath and complains about some scratches and then offers me a hundred dollars less and I nearly scream at her as I escort her to the door. Next, a leisurely retired couple, and this is their hobby, just looking at people’s furniture, wasting their time, taking their own stroll through the homes of New York City. A dozen more people after that. They ask to use my bathroom; they dry their hands on my towel. They toss their to-go cups in my garbage. They test out the chair, stretch their legs on the ottoman. A recovering frat boy with no taste of his own who has the impression this is the kind of furniture he should want; he says, “It looks so retro.” No, pass, get out of my house. Underbidders, underachievers, unlikable human beings. None of you are allowed to have my father’s chair.
Then there’s Aaron, an aspiring folksinger, six months in the city, who smells like weed. Curly-haired and open-shirted. My father would have loved him for different reasons. Aaron would have listened raptly to the three Dylan stories in my father’s possession. My father loved to tell those stories. Aaron tells me he’s got a van downstairs, he could take the chair right now, no problem. The van is for touring, he says. He plays coffeehouses across America. Folk music, he moved here for the folk scene, he says. Is there a folk scene, I think but do not say out loud, oh wait I did. “There is,” he says and he laughs. “I like you,” he says. “You’re a real ball buster.” This seems to me to be his way of reclaiming control of the conversation, acknowledging my critique but also de-feminizing me. He’s dumb, and just another man. I don’t care about his unbuttoned shirt anymore. He offers me two hundred dollars for the chair. “Bye-bye,” I say.
“Come have coffee with me, then,” he says. He glances at the bottle of wine, half empty. “Or a drink. Or whatever you want.” He says I look like I need some fresh air. That’s true. I walk outside with him. He points out the van. He says I should get in it. I do. We make out in the van for a while. “Let’s get high,” he says. “I don’t want to,” I say. “I’m already drunk. I don’t need to.” “I do,” he says. He smokes weed from a one-hitter. “OK, all right,” I say. I take a hit.
We go back upstairs to my apartment and fool around some more, and we get really close to having sex, I mean we are basically naked, I’ve got my underpants on, he’s got his boxers on, but his dick is sticking out of them and is pressing up against me hard, and then he backs me onto the chair, and that’s when I freak out. “I think you should leave,” I tell Aaron. “This was too weird.” “Are you sure?” he says. “We could just do it right now, super hard and fast, and then it will be over.” He utters a string of filthy words, barely forming a sentence, but I get the idea. “No, go,” I say. I don’t feel threatened by him, but I get a little physical anyway, and I push him out the door. The action feels right. Then he disappears, presumably into the white-hot folk scene of New York City.
What was all that? My home was just ravaged by strangers. My body, too. I had made out with a man in a van. I had allowed all this to happen to me. I had invited this into my home. I could have just thrown that chair away and nothing bad would have happened. I feel deeply, physically ill. This fucking chair. I want it gone. Suddenly I remember the business card from the man who could do anything. I dig in my desk drawer, I dial the number. Alonzo picks up. I remind him who I am, that I’m my mother’s daughter. “Evelyn’s daughter, sure. Ev-e-lyn,” he sings.